This is Danny Alexander’s sum up of the year, his Occupation as a music writer and political thinker.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
2011 in Review: My Occupy 25
I hate making year end lists. I’m a slow listener, for starters. And other than superficial run-ins with the radio, I tend to listen to one thing at a time. Once I get into some music enough to write about it, I don’t look up much until the writing’s done.
I reviewed about 22 albums in 2011. Since my I-Tunes lists about 22 new album releases a month, I’ve deeply listened to (and this is being wildly generous to myself) at most 1/12th of the music high profile enough for a (let’s call it) national conversation about the state of our music. Since about half of what I’ve listened to is regional and not likely to be listed in I-Tunes new releases, it’s safe to guess I’m listening to less than 1/24 of what we might talk about in a year-end review. So, while I’m sometimes asked to do those things, I’ve never seen it as a gauge of what mattered most that year. It’s what mattered most to me, which is, at best, an argument for the importance of some things others might have overlooked or undervalued.
But, then, I do have a desire to sum up the year, in some way that makes sense in terms of how I work. I started writing about music as an act of rebellion- . . . Read More Here
