My vote is Stuart. Leave it at that.

OK boys, it seems we have consensus. Ha. To be honest, I'm not sure what your vote is for Stu (you're a madman and I've come to accept that) - do you mean you'd like to have Rock as your category? OR you'd chose to eliminate Rock if we needed to eliminate one?

Mark I like your idea, and we did have a discussion along those lines the other night. The reason we proposed a competition at the higher level (versus subcategories) is that (a) I quite like the idea - the goofiness if you will - of pitting Jazz or Folk against Pop or Classical and declaring one the winner (yes! finally we know! lol) (b) it gives the "player" tons of leeway and will make for some interesting choices and (c) not everyone is all that interested in the major genres, so to have an entire night of folk or classical or electronica might be less appealing to some. Happy to continue to consider this if others feel different. Majority rules.

In terms of categories, we spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out what to do with Rock/Pop (likely too big and dominant on its own), and came up with the idea of Soft Rock / Pop and Hard Rock as two categories. Thoughts?

Another question wrt categories was that there could be a challenge by a competitor against the other competitor if he didn't believe that selection belonged in the category (ie he played Led Zeppelin as Soft Rock/Pop), and if the majority of the non-players in that round agreed, he would have to skip the track.

Mike - any chance of you coming down for the Saturday night of that weekend?

Kyle,
It was more an attempt at humour..... my vote is rock, leave it at that....
s

Wow. This is really fucking complicated. I have no idea what we're doing but... I'm in. Just give me my instructions and what music to prepare and I'll be there. (Apologize for the vulgarity, but I take all my verbal cues now from the mayor of Toronto, bitches.)

In the meantime, a hilarious review of possibly the least essential album of the millienium, though we be only a dozen years into it.

sounds good to me......better if its the friday as the 21st is an opening night at canstage and Brian and or I may be at it....

I would like to add British folk rock to this......,

but I do not want a face full of scottish fist so I will bid my time...

(I was seriously thinking of hosting a night next year wherein I would supply all the music of that genre from obscure to ....welllll you know ..... semi obscure..... but I take it that would not be popular. After finishing a book on this era I have become obsessively buried back in it, recently picking up far far too much of this stuff, )

Officially my vote would be rock , but that would be like every cdclub night.....

Brian, i like the idea but i might suggest that rather than talking meta genre vs. meta genre, that we pit the sub genre vs sub genre. i.e. one night we do "classical" and set the moderns against the classical vs baroque vs opera (although not a period) vs medieval etc. (or whatever)

A jazz night might include various sub classifications that might be geographical or by era or stylistic distinctions ...or maybe a showdown of the best jazz instrument.

I found that the last battle we did was fun but too polarizing and i think that pitting classical vs disco is just not fair because they are such different beasts. (although i am sure the disco would emerge triumphant)

With rock you could mix it up and send the "trio" into the ring against the "ballad" or the "glam icon" or whatever. I like to think it might be a little more interesting and there might even be some disagreement as to whether a particular cut should be allowed to fall into it's category.

Like Stuart, i always like the shades of grey that fall between the black and the white.

OK gents, the night of beer-drinkin' has occurred, and Derek and I have a proposal for the next (bi-annual) Music-Club-focused-listening-and-friendly-competition-in-which-Derek-gets-annoyed-night. I'm going to suggest the third week in January as the tentative date - say Friday or Saturday of the 20th-21st weekend. And Mike, you should plan to come down for it.

And here it is. Rather than considering (and comparing) our favourite music from the Time dimension, we are proposing that we look at it from the aspect of GENRE. Yes, that's right. GENRE. As we did in 2010, we suggest that each Music Guru is randomly assigned a genre, and can play 15 minutes (max) of music when his turn is called, up to 4 tracks, and, for some of the genres, MAY play partials. We can sort out some of the other rules later (I have a few in mind). Same double elimination format.

The genres for your consideration:

Rock (hard)
Rock (soft and pop)
Jazz
Classical
Folk
Electronic

Of course there are others, but we felt that these would have the most play within the group. If we need fewer for fewer attendees, arguably Folk would be the first cut. I know Derek had a case of the willies when he thought of programming a night within that genre. We could put that to a vote.

What say you to the idea?

I would deffer to Stuart on the official definition of the word Goooge as they invariably come from Scarborough, and, might also seek the correct spelling of the word from him although i realise that's like asking a blind man what he thinks of the colour of a wall. (if i may be so politically incorrect)

I'm still trying to figure out what a goooge is. Apparently something to do with Alice Cooper.

What immediately came to mind when you mentioned little known classics, Bri, were the Wheedle's Groove reissues, a collection of rare and dismissed 45s compiled and reissued a few years ago, as well as similar efforts from the Numero Group, my knowledge of which is directly credited to Derek, who bought me a series of these for my birthday a few years back.

But a direct reissue example, again courtesy Deeman's patronage, would be Opa's Back Home, some jazz fusion from the mid 70s. Surely there are others as well. All are very different from the 'take an album from 20 years ago and sell it again with a few lesser versions tacked onto the end' reissue.

Mike your comments echo my reaction to the Nevermind reissue, some of which I listened to on Rdio recently, and contains similarly underwhelming 'additions'. Tried playing the alt-take of Lithium and stopped it halfway through to return to the original. Which is probably what God, and certainly Kurt, intended.

Yes I totally agree re re-issues. So many superfluous and silly re-purchases I've made! What CAN be exciting is when some clever A&R guy finds a little-known classic and brings it back to life via re-issue. Trying to think of a good example.....Kyle, care to assist?

And I might say I'm shocked, SHOCKED I say, that two of the blog confess to never having listened to Starfish in its entirety. I'm a pretty big Church fan. Particularly given the ass-kicking use I made of it in the Decades competition last year.

On a tangential note, but a good one, given how that Decades evening has gone down in Blog-lore, we should consider devising a new competition to focus our listening for the early new year. Derek, perhaps you and I need to go to Betty's.

I'd go as far as saying that many reissues actually diminish the album instead of enhancing it. The originally selected music, which is generally well-loved by the time the reissue emerges, is watered down by the addition of demo tracks, alternate versions and other "extras". Peeking behind the scenes and hearing a stripped down, unpolished acoustic demo that was never meant for public consumption doesn't help me appreciate the song. If anything, it makes the song sound more ordinary and less compelling. When I was downloading albums to replace the casettes that I was throwing away, I ended up with reissued versions of several of them. I can't think of one of them that was improved by the additional material - having heard it once, I generally choose to only listen to the original tracks thereafter.

Co-incidentally i just listed to Starfish just last week, excellent album. I have never owned it but was reputed to throw it own just about every time I went over to Stuart's for about a decade.

Talking about re-issues, i was listening to Alice Cooper on the mighty Q (ya i can be a goooge) the other night as he has a late night program and he was playing a Floyd re-issue as they have done just about the whole catalogue ...after the cut finishes, Alice comes on and says "can you hear the difference? ...I can't" ...i had to laugh!

Starfish = 1988. I must confess, though I've always loved the track off this album, I've never listened to the entire thing, an oversight I am currently rectifying through the magic of Rdio. So, definitely eligible for the best of the last 23 years, no less an arbitrary number that that selected by NME (I know, I know, they were consciously trying to come up with a post-grunge list...)

While I'm being cranky, is there anyone out there who's really into these reissues? I don't mean the Smashing Pumpkins specifically, though these are the two to own, but any type of reissue. I haven't really come across any that have added much value to my collection. Paler, unfinished versions of songs that didn't make the initial cut plus some warbling live performances thrown in don't compel me to fork over again for the same disc.

Again, we may have covered this territory already--after 7 years posting here, overlap is likely--but I'm wondering if any of you feel passionately about reissues either way. Am I completely misguided and ignorant. With regards to this issue, specifically, I mean.

I haven't heard anything new that really inspired me in a while, but the other day I listened to Starfish by The Church for the first time in a long while. It's a little too old to fit into the "last 15 years" category that Kyle just posted about, and I don't know how many people would list it on their "best of the decade" selections, but I was reminded of just how much I love that album. Revisiting old favorites after not hearing them for a long time is one of the benefits of having a collection that is too large to manage!

While we've noted that all such attempts at definitive 'best of' lists are doomed, the misguided, nature of NME's top 20 songs of the past 15 years elevates the word, 'arbitrary' to a whole new level.

Can anybody who crafted that list say with a straight face that they ever listen to "Hey Ya"? Or Missy Elliot? Anybody who isn't currently living in early 2004? Is "Rebellion (Lies)" really The Arcade Fire song that you'd pick?

At any rate, if you have the time (and I don't really so I don't know why I'm urging you to do so), you can check out the entire 150 song list, which is a little bit better but still laughably, myopically British, in that it includes anything post-1995 by Oasis and is heavily stocked with the likes of the Manic Street Preachers and the Arctic Monkeys.

And now for something completely different....not exactly Wednesday morning listening at the office but thought I'd throw some love towards my cousin Michael's band's latest release, now streaming at exclaim.

damn...thanks Derek, I missed that entirely.....Will be dearly missed, and some coincidence as I am now buried once again in more obscure brit folk and folk rock of that era due to a book I am currently reading, which I think kyle put me on to in a previous blog

I don't know his stuff very well (still getting up to speed) but I know Stuart reveres him. Another great one leaves us behind.