My daughter is 19. Being that both of her parents are musicians, she has been around music her whole. I have tried to do my “fatherly duty” of making sure I instilled some sense of understanding around music history, aesthetics, and the like. Of course, being more than twenty years younger than I, her ideas of what constitute “good music” are different from mine. But, I think she at least has a pretty good handle on being able explain why she likes the music she does, which is the best I could probably do.
A few days ago, she asked me—via text message, of course—what my “top 10 goat albums [sic.]” are. List like this are always “problematic” (which is a word I am starting to really dislike), and are nearly impossible to do “right.” So, I tried to not really overthink it that much and sent her this:
In no particular order:
Kid A
Pet Sounds
Abbey Road
Kind Of Blue
Music For Airports
Bitches Brew
Hunky Dory
Highway 61 Revisited
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Thriller
Of course, my biases are reflected, here. But, this is what I came up with at that moment; if she asked again today I might have a different answer.
But, almost immediately after writing something like this down I start to feel a need to “defend” my choices. I start to anticipate all of the “what about?” comments or the scorns of folks who will tell me about all of the reasons this list is “bad,” and on and on. Spending the last 16+ years in academia have really worn out my patience with all of that and I have often just retreated into a pattern of not saying anything about anything so long as there is any chance that it can (’cause it will!) be misinterpreted or misconstrued. As I write this, I can practically hear the calls from my fellow musicologists or (even worse) folks from outside musicology who all want to voice their concerns about how this list is “toxic” or “a tool of white supremacy” or some other mot du jour about how this is all wrong.
This frustration and disillusionment is something I want to try to tackle more, here. But, for now, just enjoy the list.1
Or, even better, find a way to listen to everything on the list! ↩︎