The syllabus

Here's what to expect from the site:

Music reviews of CDs, LPs, tapes, MP3s, and more. Some of the stuff will get written about after less than five listens. Some of the stuff will get written after 100 listens.

Thanks to my English major background (I'm a certified and licensed secondary teacher in WI), I tend to fuss over my writing and rewrite/revise my work as I go along. I'll also do my best to cite my sources and point other relevant reading material as needed. I hate to try and outdo people or reinvent the wheel, so if X happens to say something, I may just link to that page and move on to the next piece.

One other thing: I'll try and showcase local WI music as much as possible. Many of my friends make records and so I'll be writing about them here.

Page #1: Come on without, come on within everyone.

Before I go any further, I better say a word about the title, lest you think you stumbled onto a site about plastic discuses or bizarre stock market manuevers. No, it's about music. I started this page as an extension of my personal music journals, of which there are two: one for logging the albums I've bought, and one to review albums I've bought or heard somewhere. The purchase log started in the summer of 2004. By that point, I already had a master spreadsheet of my music collection, but I didn't have a record of when I bought my music, so I started logging aforementioned albums log. Basically, I wrote the who, the what, and the where, in a format much like this:

Left Page                                     Right Page
Month
Price - Format - Artist - Album /  Location - Who with - Any additional notes - Date


This notebook drove my former college roommate, M, crazy. Many things about me drove him crazy, but my music collecting, sources citing nature bothered him the most. Simply put, he didn't buy CDs, let alone LPs or 7"s, and thus couldn't understand why the hell I'd bother buying them either. He'd often told me as much. But as it happened one night, middle of an argument, genius struck him. How it happened, I'll never know, but what he thought was an insult I took as one hell of a good phrase. We'd gotten to arguing about money--bills weren't an issue because we were in a dorm--and how we each spent our respective paychecks. Both of us were employed at respectable screwoff campus jobs and made decent money, but, as roommates are wont to do, we argued about who's expenses were more meaningful. I remember saying to M, a seasoned partier, "All you do is invest your money in vodka and keg parties!" to which he responded, "Yeah, well, you invest your money in polyurethane discs!". As soon as he spat the words out, I shot upright and thanked him for giving my notebook a title. I was serious; I couldn't have imagined a better title. I took out my Sharpie and wrote "INVESTING IN POLYURETHANE DISCS" on the cover.

Later on, he pointed out that CDs are actually made of polycarbonate, but by then it was too late. That happened during November of 2006. The notebook's still with me, six years after I started it.