I listened to the 1001 (?) albums I should listen to before I die

This is my attempt to contribute to the April’s Cool, where instead of posting a prank-like post, some people decided to post something cool (obviously) that is unusual for the blog’s current content.

Although this is a newborn blog (I deployed it some months ago, but I only started posting a few weeks ago), I have some plans and intentions for around here. Given that, I shouldn’t post much about music, except for today. I’ll describe my experience with a long-term project (4 years and counting) that has no relation to my PhD: The day I decided to listen to all 1001 albums we must listen to before we die.

I like to listen to music, but how much?

As I believe it’s common to everyone, I have listened to music almost every day since my childhood, and with more frequency and atention throughout my teenage years and adulthood.

For some dark times long ago, I used to say I was a typical rock fan/grunge-ish, sometimes metalhead, even though I’d never really enjoyed all the subgenres on the metal spectrum (I can’t even name all of them).

Over the years, I became a bit more eclectic in my musical tastes. Still, I got a problem: my favorite playlist had around 50 songs, and I was getting tired of them. With my accounts on streaming services, I realized I had access to a catalog of “all” songs, and I was locked into listening to the same 50ish forever? Of course, I got some novelties from radios, TV, web trends, and so on, but it was so hard to have some structure to listen to them.

Finally, the automatic recommendations from streaming services are not completely bad. Still, despite any concerns about the misuse of this feature by the big recording companies that pay to promote new releases, I indeed did miss some human curation. One of the most interesting moments in my musical taste development came from personal recommendations from friends and family, where someone chose to send me songs or mixtapes, not an automatic recommendation system.

It was then that a random HackerNewsletter dropped in my inbox with the 1001 albums generator. The idea is simple. Each day, the site provides a random recommendation from the book “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die”. It links to your favorite streaming service, and you have the opportunity to listen to something new that was selected by a human (the book author) with an explicit methodology (or something like, but we’ll reach the critics soon). It opened a real world to me.

The book

You may know this series of books, “1001 {stuff} You Must {Do} Before You Die”. Essentially, these books contain a recommendation list that goes from movies, books, and places to visit. If I didn’t get it wrong, they are not exactly a formal book series, but instead a cliché for books with suggestion lists. Of course, for many of these suggestions, it’s not possible to achieve the intent, and honestly, I don’t even think this list should be taken as some kind of “truth” and an attempt to finish those lists could easily lead to frustation.

Our tastes and experiences vary a lot, and usually, I don’t think a 1001 list will be as good as it aims to be for everyone, especially those lists guided by market flows. Anyway, even though I do not agree with the list’s general purpose, when I got the link to the generator, I decided to try it.

And after a bit more than 3 years, I’ve finished it!! I listened to all 1089 albums from the list (the book has different editions, and on each new version, they remove some albums and add new, more recent ones. The generator considers all albums from all editions.)

This is my summary page for the project, for those interested in my ratings (1-5 stars) for every album. I also tried to make a short comment on each album. These sometimes do not make sense, and often I disagree with the past me when revisiting those comments, but they are there for posterity.

What did I get from the experience?

I don’t believe we should always learn something from our experiences, and I (for sure) do not want to make this post a Linkedin style “10 things I’ve learned listening to 1089 albums”, but it’s impossible to look back where I start and see that my playlist of favorite songs goes from 50-100 songs to more than 1000 songs.

Now I know the immense variety of musical styles we have in the world (have you ever heard about hyperpop, shoegaze, doom metal and trip-hop?) and not only I’m maybe able to identify them, but also I discover that lots of music I’ve already enjoyed may be explained and sometimes had actual dedicated fans (!!). It’s funny to listen to somehing completely new to me that is a love topic to someone else.

I had the opportunity to finally listen to some classical albums I’ve never tried before (fully), like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, Clash’s “London Calling”, and “The Velvet Underground & Nico”, for example. These albums (and many others) were living on that kind of “to listen to in the future” list. I took the opportunity, and I’m happy with the result.

I also learned a lot about musical history (every album comes with links to the streaming service and the Wikipedia page, often complete and full of interesting information).

Finally, I think I have evolved during these years, and I have changed a lot (I follow the list while doing my PhD, after all). My musical taste changed for sure, and the project allowed me to think about my music consumption in a less automatic way. I not only accept the suggestion anymore, but I purposefully try to discover about the artist, the genre, the cover art (quite interesting histories), world history in general, since music is around us and reflects our times much more often than we realize without reflection.

I started to use the generator as a way to have some human curation on my daily playlists and ended up learning a lot about music and, why not, about me.

Some highlights of the experience

The summary page already gave an idea of the almost 100 albums that received 5 stars from me, and the other 65 that received 1 star. Yes, I normally dislike electronic music. This is my fault. I tried to understand, but it’s not possible. It just does not resonate with me.

I discovered that although I thought I was into Bob Dylan, it was more my pretentious version trying to sound smart than actual enjoyment of listening to its albums. The albums are not bad, but 1 pass is enough for a lifetime (it must be listened to “before I die”, right?). Some songs stay, but most of them are not for me after all.

This is the opposite of what happened to me listening to David Bowie. I already knew some important and famous songs, but I never fell down the rabbit hole of his career. Visionary is not an overused adjective when it comes to Bowie. His albums vary so much, and they have so much intensity and truth that even when I didn’t understand something or when I listened to the album during a commute without much attention, it was impressive and it took me to different places and made me travel to his songs.

My selection “favorite album” was “MTV Unplugged In New York” from Nirvana. The teenager inside me was screaming too loudly at me, so I gave it to him. It’s an incredible album, and I remember when it was selected by the generator that I listened to it 4 or 5 times in the same week. The full concert is online on YouTube in 4K (I’m unsure if it’s official, but anyway), and I beg you to give it a chance in case you have never tried.

The project also made me have contact with a lot (I mean, A LOT) of strange stuff. Some noisy rock, free jazz, and experimental songs that I surely will never try by myself. The strangest one? Play the video below and let me know what you think of hardcore jazz.

Joyful right? 🙃 I don’t know what you think, but I was really pleased to have the opportunity to listen to it. These musicians know what they are doing when they decide to go for this ride.

At the end, no matter if I enjoyed it, if it became a new favorite, or if I just forgot about it in the minute the album ended on my earphones, going through the full list of albums was a great experience that I indeed recommend to anyone. It will not exactly teach you many things, but I’m sure it will change you.

The problems of the list

Maybe I’ll be a bit picky with this topic, but the book authors are too UK/US-centric. Yes, I got that English is a kind of lingua franca, even when dealing with music, and I recognize that the album era is driven mostly by the UK and US musical industry, but a lot of selected albums could be easily replaced by many albums outside of the UK/US.

The selection includes a few examples, but they are mostly outdated, and it’s impossible not to note it.

The original book is edited by Robert Dimery. I truly believe he (and the team responsible for the book) has a good methodology to select the most important albums that deserve a listening session. Still, they could go beyond the album era’s comfort zone and provide a more diverse list.

I didn’t read the book yet, but going through the full list and reading almost all the Wikipedia pages for each album made me understand the choices, even without full agreement. No list will be perfect to everyone, so I think dealing with the “failures” of the list is just part of the process.

Does it end?

Well, I’m not alone on this project, since there is a website on HackerNews about it. According to the site stats, around 65000 people are trying to finish the list before they die when I’m writing this post.

Other 500-ish people finished the list, and (since now we’re all addicts) each can suggest an album to the list that wasn’t included in the original 1001 (in any version). The community around the site is now the curator for new albums. I’ve listened to almost 250 albums from the user’s list. It is at the same time an extension of the original experience and a completely new one, since now the list is much more about me listening to the favorite albums of other people and less a professional selection of essential albums. At first glance, it does not look so different, but having access to people’s minds (at least a tiny part of it) is a strange and interesting experience.

The user’s list is full of hidden and underground bands, cliché-pop that is someone’s favorite, even being objectively a bad album, and new and interesting discoveries from a lot of different countries, origins, languages, and cultures. Another opportunity to touch the extent of human creativity through music is really exciting. Even though I am much less disciplined in the matter of listening to an album every weekday, I still follow the list from time to time and feed my ears with novelty. The new list is much more diverse than the original one, even though it’s possible to understand the problems that come from a non-methodological album selection.

I’ll keep following it and keep discovering new stuff every day.

Final thoughts

I cannot say that going through this experience will improve anyone’s life, but I’m sure it will give anyone a glimpse of what is possible to do with some words and a few instruments (or computers, since electronic music is there, and with a huge number of albums).

I still do not agree that market-driven lists can be considered as a de facto list that can guide anyone, and if followed by anyone, it’s always good to follow them with a pinch of salt and a critical mind. It’s better than a soulless algorithm, and it’s great, but it’s never free of biases, prejudices, and, after all, humanity.

After (re-)discovering my pleasure in following lists, I got my digital hands on the online version of Sight&Sound “The greatest films of all time”, and if music touched me so much, what will movies do? I’ll not commit to it since movies takes much more time and no movie streaming service is as complete as any music streaming service in numbers of available content (I’ve already searched some of the movies from the list and sometimes it’s annoying how hard is to get access to them), but maybe I’ll have another good topic for the next April 1st.