pebkac thoughts

I just had a funny conversation with a friend about why In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Amnesiac are both great albums with several songs that don’t stand well on their own (at least not on the first listen), and their release dates (Aeroplane in 1998 and Amnesiac in 2001) meant that the former was loved and the latter… not so much. Once Napster and all the rest had sufficiently permeated the culture, people were first exposed to an album not as the assembled whole but through the individual song downloads, and some of the songs just didn’t seem worth downloading, so people came to the conclusion that the album, taken as a whole, was crap. Clearly there’s more going on here (expectations, packaging, etc.), but I think my point stands. What’s funny, though, is that my friend was simply SHOCKED that Aeroplane was released in 1998. She thought it was much, much more recent. This is an album she’s heard all the way through maybe four or five times. I think her words were, “I don’t think I could have appreciated Neutral Milk Hotel without first hearing a lot of Sufjan Stevens.”

It says a lot about Aeroplane that it doesn’t strike her as being a decade old. Come to think of it, last year I was totally stuck on OK Computer. I think I’ll continue my tradition of getting stuck on albums that are 10 years old. Anybody care to recommend some great albums from 1999?