Current adventures in pop music: Rehash and carefully edit your adolescence in fifteen minutes.

Some people I know filled in an online questionnaire asking them to name fifteen albums they like in fifteen minutes. The rules work as follows:

Don't take too long to think about it. Only one album per artist. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes!

As a means of distracting myself I attempted this task, but after relying on my memory for the first ten I could think of, I started to cheat, flicking through various mp3 playlists to try and jog my memory of various things I should include. Quickly, the whole integrity of the process was thrown out the door as I realised I was being selective about what to include, lest I be accused of not having the correct contextually relevant nostalia-based picks. So I tried to do it again, believing I'd be truer to the process with a clean slate. I still cheated, but felt slightly better about the whole thing. For the sake of showcasing how I spent way too much time thinking about this, I'll share the list with you now (in alphabetical order, not of preference, of course):

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
Blur - 13
LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
Michael Jackson – Dangerous
Muse – Origin of Symmetry
Nine Inch Nails – The Fragile
Pulp – This Is Hardcore
Radiohead – OK Computer
Regurgitator – Unit
Roxette – Tourism: Songs from Studios, Stages, Hotelrooms & Other Strange Places
Super Furry Animals – Guerilla
Supergrass – Supergrass
U2 – Achtung Baby
Various Artists – Teen Idols*
Weezer – Weezer (The Blue Album)

*Note: This probably doesn't count, as its not by one artist, but if it's something that theoretically "will always stick with [me]", then this definitely counts, if only because of the amount of times I listened to it as a child. This was a cassette my grandfather owned, and played in his car on almost constant repeat. As a result, I can easily recall the lyrics to "Workin' For The Man" by Roy Oribison. 

As these things go, there are always things you want to include, or wish you did due to time constraints, or a sudden change in taste. In this particular instance, these were:

The B52s – Time Capsule: Songs For A Future Generation
Faith No More – Album of The Year
Garbage – Version 2.0
Negativland - Dispepsi
(The) Smashing Pumpkins – Adore

...

Feel free to judge.  This won't change much, but you can nonetheless.

Beaten to various punches.

There's nothing like being reminded of the fact that at the end of the day you're not only not particularly unique, but over a long enough period of time you're destined for cliche. Doing this on the internet is a bonus, purely because of the volume of other mundane actions that sits alongside yours.

Case in point; writing a blog post that is apologetic about not writing blog posts. Enter artist Cory Archangel. His most recent project is a blog entirely devoted to reposting blog entries written by other people apologising for not posting on their blogs. You can find it here. It's very clever, and makes me feel just a little bit silly.

This was brought to my attenion by Samuel Bruce, who is currently curating Electro_Online, a selection of net-based art works and curios. It's all tied up in this festival I've been working on for the last few years. Perhaps you've heard of it?

Potentially unsubstantiated claims.

So a while ago I started a blog. 

It was great too; I would write things on here, and the ten or so people who read it would, well, read it. We all had a real nice thing going on there. Then I became one of those people who didn't blog all that much, and when I did, I would apologise to those ten or so people about how I write in the blog, and how, this time, things would be really different.

And so it went.

Recently, I've thought somewhat about how exactly this situation arose, and have put it down to two main contributing factors:

1. A tendency to make notes about things I wanted to blog about, but would never get around to it, thus creating a strange feeedback loop in my brain where I couldn't continue with new things until I had posted something about the other fifty things I had yet to post about.
   
2. A combination of laziness, and how facebook is a really good enabler for laziness*. Think about it, why write about things when you can just post a link to something, and then people can click on some java code that says they find the thing you like just as mildly amusing as you do. Genius.

The conclusion I have come to is that I in order to break this strange self-imposed cycle I would simply start writing again and see what happens. Seems like a logical enough idea to me anyway. So we'll see how it goes. I'm not making any promises, and I'm morbidly aware that I don't need anything else to distract me right now, but at the very least it could be entertaining for us all to watch. And that sure is something.

* This may technically count as three factors, but we can all just let this slide for now, yes?