Archive for January 21st, 2007

Yes, there will be two Black coaches in the Super Bowl!!!  Geeked up is not the word.  This is almost as good as the Eagles going again.  (Which they will…)

How much music is too much?  I currently have about 8700 songs on my ipod.  A friend of mine has a somewhat mathematical model of a reasonable number of songs for a person’s library.  He calculates that the upper limit of a library should be about 18K songs.  After that, he says, you’re treading into some area of dementia.  His formula is this: if we say that there about 52 really good songs that come out every year and multiply that times 3 genres and allow for a 75-year span of music, that comes out to just about 18000.   A couple things to note:  I don’t think that 75-year span is the listener’s lifetime, I think that’s the span of the 52 songs/genre.
On the real, this is a very modern discussion, since it’s only with the advent of the mp3 player that we count music libraries by songs instead of albums or tapes.   Cuz thinking back to the era of the 45, I can easily see buying more than one 45  per genre per week.  In other words, I don’t know that I really agree with the model, but I’m willing to take it at face value and say that 18,000 songs is a cutoff point.  That’s more than twice what I have now.  But somehow, I think that, barring concurrent hard drive meltdowns and whatnot, I’ll be getting close to that number sooner or later.

Now I ain’t gonna lie, there are some songs in my collection that I have just to have.  For instance, I have this two-disc set of Mahalia Jackson songs.  Don’t get me wrong, I respect Mahalia as a legend, but more often than not, I hafta be in a particular mood to hear that type of singing.   But then, that’s why I burn the whole disc, because there are times when I am in that mood.

Then there’s the goodness of coming across some previously-unknown goodness.  There are several songs that I came across like that, the most notable being Separated by Slave and The Body That Loves You by Janet.

So long story short, I’m still aiming to get to 10000 soon.  Eight thousand songs after that?  I truly don’t believe that my tastes are that wide.  We’ll see, though.