a love letter to user lists
As a total, unabashed music enthusiast (read: nerd), my favorite thing about eMusic is probably the myriad ways I end up discovering (and LOVING) songs, albums, bands that I’ve not so much as sniffed at before. Among the various forms of editorial floating throughout the site — dozens, spotlights, interviews, daily reviews — there is a largely unsung, extremely useful and crazily fun portal for discovery: user lists. Since beginning to truly dive into the site, I’ve bookmarked a number of user lists along the way and continually refer back to them to clog my Save for Later.
When we were putting together the African Music hub, user lists were heavily utilized and endlessly inspiring. Even in an environment of constantly listening to, thinking about, writing about and generally being immersed in music, it’s heartening (and shocking, honestly) to have an outlet for discovery that’s still genuinely exciting.
I’ve listed some personal user list highlights after the jump.
Absolute killer first wave punk tracks, by paraphrase: Short, but sweet. Pretty appropriate for a melodic punk list. Introduced me to The Tights, for which I couldn’t be more grateful. The reviews/blurbs are also appropriately quick n’ hilarious — on “Terminal Stupid” by The Sniveling Shits: “The rest of their output is spotty.”
Curiosities, by brighternow: Lots of out-there, extremely intriguing spoken word stuff (Hitchcock, Peter Lorre, Dali: in his own words, etc). Also tipped me to the fact that we have Joe Meek’s I Hear a New World which yes, is a curiosity, but is also pretty essential.
Ethnomusicology, by keramiel: A great filter for the mountains of great ethno discs from Folkways and Buda. This stuff will send you down the rabbit hole, believe it.
Grimy hip hop lover, by wonderwomanaz: This one has Keyes written all over it. Focusing on that ’90s-y, gritty, east coast boom bap stuff that eMu actually has an extremely respectable collection of. Think: MF Doom off-shoots, Masta Ace, anything 9th Wonder-related.
Kraut tentacles, by turserin: I’ve come late, and slowly, to kraut. This list has the requisite Amon Duul and Faust, but doesn’t even pretend to stop there.
Name-dropped in Losing My Edge, by duggie: This is the kind of thing that makes these lists so special. For the uninitiated, “Losing My Edge” is the track that largely put James Murphy/DFA Records/LCD Soundsystem on the map — a cheeky-yet-killer obscure record-referencing dance groove from the early ’00s. duggie has compiled as much as he could from the eMusic catalog. The result is simultaneously hilarious, impressive and wildly satisfying.
piano music, by dragonpearl: There’s a lot of great modern classical-y piano stuff on eMusic and this list helped me grab a BUNCH of new stuff. If you’ve been interested in the recent wave of the stuff (Hauschka, Library Tapes, Sylvain Chauveau), don’t-walk-but-run to this list.
Clever Hipster Torture Kit, by MC-CashDiscount: Hands-down the most absurd list here. Everything about this rules: from a metal tribute to the Bee Gees, to the Mega-Giga-Giggle Song to the name of the list itself. NOT to be missed.
Folkways Oddities, by ToddBurns: Amazing list of Folkways curios from former editor and general rad dude Todd Burns.
avant-garde jazz, by esther.bxl: Jazz is especially a genre I need help in, so I’ve referred back to this list a number of times. Everything from ‘Trane to How to Raise an Ox.
dubstep, by superintendent-x: Not sure if anyone besides me and a handful of East Londoners care about dubstep past Burial in late ’08, but this list goes much, much deeper than the average primer. If you like it dark n’ heavy, dig in.
Music for the end times, by kingskeeter: Conceptual lists can easily get a bit messy, but the digital crunch doom n’ gloom of kingskeeter’s choices holds together quite nicely (and creepily).
I could go on and on (and on), but I already feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome here. Obviously there are a ton more — if you’ve got some favorites, or lists of your own, drop ‘em in the comments!
Lovely post. Perhaps once in a while you might consider promoting one of these on the magazine page, or inviting the list creator to write a short top to lead into the list.
I’ve found a lot of fun stuff on user lists. Actually it was through an emusic list that I first heard about Interpol (http://www.emusic.com/profile/index.html?nickname=chr1sb0y#/profile/ajax/lists/showlist.html?nickname=chr1sb0y&lid=1181&p=) a while back. I’ve also discovered Beirut through a free tracks list and Azeda Booth from some random list that is now forgotten. I like lists.
I am all over that ‘Grimy Hip-Hop’ List.
Damn. You’re just trying to make my buy booster packs, now aren’t ya.
Going through the Grimy Hip-Hop list brought to mind cLOUDDEAD and I was wondering if eMusic would ever expand their Mush Records collection? They have some great stuff beyond the current availability that I would love to see on eMusic.
You must have missed the dubstep section in my Halloween post. Freakin love the stuff. Been going to a monthly dubstep night @ love lately, it always gets packed.
I haven’t made any lists yet but will probably make some yearlies. I haven’t checked them out either but that’s because I really don’t trust the opinions of others unless I know they’re on the same level as me, and that’s hard to come by.
Clever Hipster Torture Kit just doesn’t want to be discovered. It appears briefly on screen but then switches to emusic is temporarily unavailable. Oh well.
Awesome post. Please make this a regular feature. So much of what I download comes from user lists and I love catching new ones.
Sorry to repost but I put this in the halloween one but it probably makes more sense here:
Dubstep fans unite! It can be easy to miss albums as they come in, maybe there should be either a regular feature or a rolling thread or something. Lists are awesome (yes there are some great ones here thanks), but unfortunately we can’t leave comments.
This shows that the emu staff not only shares the subschribers passion for music, but also is genuinely interested in what is moving amongst us subschribers. This is rare and deserves a lot of credit.
I want to use this oportunity to point out why some of my lists came to be:
the Chris Cutler, Robert wyatt, Tom Cora and Tuxmo (Tuxedomoon) lists were all compiled because the artist pages of these four is far from complete.
As an example: The Chris Cutler artist page consists of 4 releases 1 by another CC.
My list consists of 43 releases.