Popular Music - December 2016

Tori Amos - Abnormally Attracted to Sin
Tori Amos - Unrepentant Geraldines
Toni Childs - Keep the Faith
Christine and the Queens - Christine and the Queens
Janet Jackson - Janet
Sting - Mercury Falling

Another month with not much pop music, if my records are to be believed. And they generally are, although they won't include any half-listens, incomplete selections or music I don't actually own.

I did go out of my way to explore some long-forgotten corners of the library. Neither the Toni Childs album nor the Janet Jackson album had been listened to for a number of years. And neither, to be honest, is anything wonderful, but they are least decent. I quite enjoyed Janet in particular, but it's still a bit uneven.

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For the year as a whole, it seems I listened to 91 different albums, EPs or singles. Which is a bit low. It's not even two a week, which is quite disappointing.

I could of course quite easily boost the number by slapping albums on as background noise and paying as little attention to them as possible, but that really isn't my preferred mode of listening. I think one of the things holding back the list has been my reluctance to add some new albums into rotation without listening to them carefully, with lyrics at hand at least once... and then not investing the time required to make that happen. Classical music - and in particular, Classical music without any lyrics - has generally been winning the competition for my time. As has good television, and less good internet.

This might change soon, when I've reached the end of my big collection of Classical purchases. I'm not sure. Maybe it's become my main habit.

Or maybe I'm just repeatedly listening to the pop music I like the most. Tori Amos of course remains a staple, with 12 entries for the year. Radiohead and Something for Kate/Paul Dempsey are also very well represented. There was some variety in my listening to Thrice and Jars of Clay, and after that it falls away badly. It seems I only listened to one full Kate Bush album all year!

It's worth mentioning that for many artists I might only have 1 or 2 albums in the first place, but nevertheless I do feel I need to work on the diversity here. That was one of the intentions of keeping track of my listening, to identify things that I hadn't listened to for some time and then listen to them. It seems that on the pop music side of things, it's only working intermittently.