how often should your "favourite record" change?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the lex has a (pro forma) go at peelie over on FT for having the same favourite single for 20-odd years -- viz "teenage kicks" (peel was 41 i think whe he heard this record)

anyway, it raises a question or three

i: how often does YOUR favourite record change?
ii: how often SHOULD your favourite record change?
iii: once you get past age [x] it is odd nay weird if your favourite record carries on changing every day/week/year <--- what for you is value [x], in ref.day/week/year respectively

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ps ignore stupid cute-quotes in title -- i have no idea what misprision i felt i wz protecting the reader from there, dearie-me

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have said that mine changed (it was "Going Underground" for basically the 90s), so much it became impossible to pick one over another - I get different joy from that record as I do from "Take On Me" or "We Want Fun" or "Dinu Lapatti's Bones" or Alan Moore's "Heaven". This is not because music suddenly became diverse, of course, or that I hated "Take On Me" before, just that I lost the need to say "but first and foremost I am a punk".

I am not entirely certain whether the Lex intends the implication that John Peel's taste solidified in 1978!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I intend the implication that J Peel is BORING :D

I don't have a favourite record any more because I have heard too many, my favourite record du jour changes as soon as I hear something new.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

right now it is 'OOC' by Mariah! (at lunch it was 'I'm That Chick')

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Like Peel (I suspect) did, I tend to have a stock answer for this (and 'favourite band/artist' too), which shifts about every five years or so.

I don't see any reason why it shouldn't change quite often. I'd be surprised if there were 'new entries' at the top on a regular basis just because the competitive set is so much greater, but all the good records I've heard are jockeying for position all the time. My stock favourite album answer now would probably be Actually, by the Pet Shop Boys, but for a long time it was It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back: both those are from the same year so it's not like I suddenly discovered one of them.

I guess I think of my stock answer as a kind of abstract "averaging out" - i.e. "One More Time" by Daft Punk is my favourite single ever enough that it beats the claims of all the other ones.

re iii. - I wouldn't find it odd, because I'd assume they had an aesthetic of responding to whims in taste rather than big underlying shifts. The song I love most on any given day is often not my "favourite record" answer (this is also why I think your cute-quotes were fine!)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Obviously Peel's DIDN'T shift - I meant his was a stock answer.

(I can also imagine him asking of everything he ever heard, "Is this better than Teenage Kicks? No." and still being quite happy with hearing new things. I suspect his relationship to TK was closer to his relationship with Liverpool FC than it was to 'liking a record'.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

not that he loved LFC more or less than he did music but the idea of an unshiftable allegiance.

That's by the end though (well, by the late 80s). What's interesting though is that there must have been a few years in which at least the possibility of a better record than "Teenage Kicks" being made was still open.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

see i'm slightly suspicious of that kind of claim lex -- yes yes yr "record i like most right now" changes lots and quickly, hooray well done you, but isn;t "favourite record" more like "record that has stood my personal test of time", record that i still love over significant taste-shifts in the world (and in me)

so what i'm saying is yr dodging the question w.a bit of semantic chicanery really :D

i also actually think answers to this question are pretty likely to be different given yr age -- the "settling down" issue which everyone aged 20 thinks will never happen to em, and which REALLY REALLY few ppl my age find they don't have to address in some way

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Mark I know I'm always jumping off your springboards for P4K stuff but I might well use this for this month's column if that's OK! I think it's a very interesting area.

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

i) Not very often
ii) As often as you like
iii) Not sure

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

another meaning for favourite is as a touchstone-test of whether you lovelovelove a record -- as opposed to "appreciate" it, or "recognise its importance" or "find it useful to discuss" or whatever

"does it make me feel the way XXX does?" -- and actually for this to be operative, you need yr touchstone NOT to shift around too much

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

I have described my life.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

go ahead! i am total god-emperor of "do me homework 4 me plz interwebs"

[koganbot]

The thing is, for me, my changes may reflect an underlying lack of change, so still might be indicative of (to put it negatively) a lack of imagination or (to put it positively) consistency. Which is to say, if I like Paris Hilton now for reasons that are similar to some of the reasons that I liked the Rolling Stones in 1967 (on the Bedbugs Reynolds thread you said that you liked Paris because she was shameless; the Rolling Stones have a line that goes "No excuses offered anyway"), then how much have I really changed? The point being that what the Rolling Stones '67 music does when replayed now isn't what it did then, but what I want may have not changed much since then, hence I go to different sources for the same old thing.

Anyway, my standard answer for the last 28 years or so has been Spoonie Gee's "Spoonin Rap" (1979, despite what YouTube says) except on occasion when it's Debbie Deb's "When I Hear Music" (1983).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

This question really is about allegiances, isn't it? I.e. for a stock answer you pick a record that most represents your taste, as manifesto for your music fandom values, etc. Hence I usually say New Order is my favorite band not necessarily because the ranking is easy (I hate making ranked lists of anything) but because they encapsulate my relationship with indie and with dance and also sonic priorities (I prefer this type of rhythm section, the mood conveyed, and so on). Other then that I find it impossible to develop any sort of criteria because there are countless individual songs I'd be happy to listen to over and over at any moment in time. About half of the Pet Shop Boys' entire discography, say.

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of Derek Malcolm getting sick of the same question re: favourite film and giving the stock answer every time of Ozu's Tokyo Story, because i) he did like the film, but more importantly ii) hardly anyone's ever seen it so didn't argue with him or ask him any further questions.

I liked Peel for not falling into this and choosing a song everybody knows (but do they mostly know it because of Peel? I don't know its history) when he could have just chosen Turtles Have Short Legs to shut people up given the number of times he must have been asked the question.

[koganbot]

I've never been able to find an mp3 for "Spoonin' Rap," and that's because, for reasons that I can't fathom, when Tuff City put out a hits collection for Spoonie Gee several years ago they put the B-side on it, and that's what's floating around the Web. The B-side is basically a continuation of the A-side, but it's got long instrumental breaks and lyrics that are not as interesting.

[koganbot]

I hardly see movies anymore but I'VE SEEN TOKYO STORY.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well yes this is certainly one thing very many people do -- but i think koganbot's doing something else, a bit, and so was peelie actually

i guess we could say that peel was stating an allegiance to how-that-record-made-me-feel, and kogan is stating an allegiance to how-that-record-made-me-respond (since FK's response has a lot of not-just-feel content): but the word allegiance seems to require more of an idea of a publicly recognised TYPE of sound (whereas forkogan or peel it's more a type only accessible in their heads; which they only know after they've encountered it, not where to go looking for it)?

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not the most obscure film ever is it? Someone gave it to me on VHS. I don't think it was Derek Malcolm.

[koganbot]

Well, there may well be a "record that I'm hearing RIGHT NOW for only the first or twentieth time that has redrawn my map and/or may well BE my touchstone for months or years to come." (Just so that we're not too too tied to "has stood the test of time" at the exclusion of what we're hearing now.)

On this week's year in pop thread I wrote that my FAVORITE SONG IN THE WORLD is Skeeter Davis's "The End Of The World" (with the parenthetical modification "when I was nine years old").

[koganbot]

But saying "Stooges" or "New York Dolls" or "Rolling Stones" signifies a vastly different allegiance now to what it did in 1966 through 1974; also signifies a different allegiance to different people. I'm likely to tell Lex that my favorite band is the Rolling Stones, but most people these days I'll say that my favorites are Ashlee Simpson and Eminem.

I am an idiom

[koganbot]

I just used the British idiom "different to"!!!!!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think that's the problem with the word "allegiance" but not with the phrase "manifesto for your music fandom values" (i'm guessing not everyone would accept "fandom" as self-description) -- and yes, yr manifesto may be better represented by difft figures when yr engaging w.difft people

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

i: it did not change much at all when i was growing up. i initially decided it was 'Blue Monday' a year or two after the 1988 remix but around that time (of the decision) 'Pacific State' came out and that quickly became #1 - possibly I was looking to be distinct in such a choice but I really believed it to be the most sublime and relevant music for me but also kinda 'safe' from a personl pov - not something I'd get sick of by hearing everywhere, no lyrics or vocals to find cliched or spent once I reached a certain age. Not that I was as prescient or perceptive at 12 as that suggests! Anyway just in time for electroclash it had swung back to 'Blue Monday' again - probably because I started wanting to 'fit in' more again I dunno.

ii: i guess there is no 'should' is there? isn't that a key popism rule?

iii: not odd, just seems kinda pointless. if your desire to elevate one song above all others still remains after all those years it seems like a contradiction to be constantly changing what that song is.