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Greg - 2006-05-16 15:52:44
That raises an interesting question. Is there a single recording artist alive or dead who never recorded anything you didn't consider at least very good? Is there any single artist's catalog you would want to own in it's entirety (outtakes and b-sides included)--not because you would like to own it but because you would enjoy listening to it? Maybe this question should be qualified by a minimum number of releases... say... six albums.
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Paula - 2006-05-16 16:37:55
Is there a single recording artist alive or dead who never recorded anything you didn't consider at least very good?

Off the top o' my head, although I'm not sure I'd add much more to this list: Robyn Hitchcock/Soft Boys...The Loud Family...Kristin Hersh/Throwing Muses...Sam Phillips (I'm not counting her Leslie Phillips output).

Anyone else want to chime in here?
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Greg - 2006-05-16 16:58:56
I'm thinking hard on this one and where the odd clunker by a favorite comes up I feel really guilty saying it aloud, or atype (apixel?) as the case may be. I'm going to have to say no. There is no single artist I need to be completist about owning, simply because they're that good. And most of my favorites have at least one really bad song. There I said it! I'm free!!!
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Paula - 2006-05-16 17:05:00
one really bad song

Oh you're counting songs? I thought you meant albums. Hmmm...everyone's got a song I don't like, even me.
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Greg - 2006-05-16 17:12:16
Well, most of my favorite artists (those with more than five or six albums)have at least one album that I don't like enough to buy, even if there are say, two really good songs.
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Paula - 2006-05-16 17:16:32
Freedy Johnston had a really good run for a while there, and then suddenly, seemingly overnight, I no longer wanted to hear his new music. The last of his that I liked was Never Home.
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Greg - 2006-05-16 18:20:36
I feel the same way about ol' Freedy. I did hear that a bunch of his old demos were released though and I'd be inclined to find that before more recent stuff. I played This Perfect World so many times the tone arm on my turntable damn near fell off. And I think REM did 5 or 6 straight albums without a bad song. Don't know if they changed after that or I did.
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2fs - 2006-05-22 18:15:35
Don't know if I could do that - don't know if I'd want to. If an artist is capable of putting out six albums that are at least "very good," for me, until they start consistently putting out albums that are "very crap," I figure they're smarter than I am: if I don't like it at first, it could well be that I will, eventually. And since I have albums that I was "meh" on for like ten years before they finally kicked in, I think I'm smarter paying whatever it costs to have the not-so-good album by the otherwise brilliant artist. Esp. when "whatever it costs" these days is so absurdly cheap, when you look around. The same logic applies to bad songs - with the added fact that hey, you can just skip 'em while playing the rest of the (presumably good) album. I still listen to albums as albums, by the way (where "album" designates "collection of songs" not "vinyl LP." "Album" doesn't actually mean "vinyl LP"...it's just that songs started being assembled into coherent units (called albums) when vinyl was the dominant medium.
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