Self-Indulgent Rock Chronology

Readers, let me tell you, a year ago when I moved to England I loaded up fifty or so CDs in a Case Logic folder that's old and decrepit enough to sometimes lets discs slide out of its yellowed slots. My Case Logic friends accompanied me on my Summer-of-Jeff adventures: Death Valley in a Lincoln Town Car Executive with Josh and sitting in traffic on the way to Bonnaroo with Jason and (lovely) Eisa. The other night, I decide to restore the CDs to their cases. I didn't finish, of course, and they're curently strewn all over my living room, no doubt endearing me further to my landlady, who is taking prospective renters through my flat three times daily. Still, going through them I thought of High Fidelity, where after his girlfriend moves out, John Cusack sorts his enormous record collection not alphabetically, but chronologically, hoping that in identifying the playlist order of his life's soundtrack, he can uncover some meaning or catharsis or distraction. I make no such high-falutin' claims, and frankly I'm okay without any catharsis right now, but without further ado, here's a "randomly" selected selection of albums, and whatever I can summon up about them from my chronology:

• Digable Planets, Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space). Prashant, who is now an ENT doctor, had this in the dorm when we were freshmen, and it was close to the top of my soon-to-purchase-or-pirate list for maybe six years. I think I bought it used at buy.com in 2001 and it spent a year or two on my desk at work. The only other CD on my desk at work was by Slobot. The lead singer of Slobot gave me that in the Foundation Room at the House of Blues after they opened for Keanu Reeves' band Dogstar. Slobot had not been impressed with Dogstar. I can't make this stuff up.


• Radiohead, Coup D'Etat. Sometimes foreign phrases, like Coup D'Etat are written in italics. So are titles. Does that mean they cancel each other out and should be normal text? No matter. I got this CD at Camden Market in London this winter. It's terrible, and was the death knell for my on-again off-again romance with bootleg CDs. I'm pretty sure a bunch of the tracks have nothing to do with Radiohead, or at least they shouldn't.


• The White Stripes, De Stijl. Matt Neuroth, rock star, played me a tape in his car one night a couple of years ago when it was really really really cold out. It had The White Stripes on one side and The Strokes on the other. I hadn't heard of either one yet, but I remember him telling me they were going to be big. He said that De Stijl was better than the Stripes' album that had just come out (White Blood Cells) so I got it a few weeks later. "Hello Operator" proved to be an excellent driving song, though when I played it for my teeny-bop Mom on a trip home to Ann Arbor, she shrieked "What is this crap?!?" after a couple of measures. Freaking out your Mom is something rock is supposed to do, but I seem to always try to share my favorites with her, with very limited success.