The 20% Rule of Record Greatness

To celebrate the release of the Monkeys' new CD here in North America, I'm going to go ahead and spend the next few days giving short reviews of some of the great records that I physically bought lately (screw iTunes & eMusic, both). Also: I'll try to figure out a way to maybe upload a few songs so that you can get an idea as to what they sound like; aside from that, you can probably just look up the band name at www.elbo.ws or at the Hype Machine.

Oh, and as I was listening to all the CDs again I realized that no matter how good an album is, there are always two or three songs that, if removed, would put that record into a whole other awe-some-sphere. I went back through some of my favourite CDs and, sure enough, there wasn't a single album that wouldn't be made greater by removing 20% of its songs. And you can't really blame the artists in most of these cases cause these songs are not fillers, but rather they differ from person to person (for some CDs, the songs that I would cut were picked as favourites by other reviewers... so go figure). Ok, that doesn't sound like much of a thought, but it seems to me that one can get more insight into the subleties of someone's music taste by finding out which 20% of the songs they would cut from their favourite CD, rather than by asking what their favourite 20% are. And something tells me that some known social-psychology principal lies behind all this; I'll have to look into this.

But next: Arctic Monkeys - "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not"