The Project

The Project

Let me start by saying, I am not an interesting person.

I am neither fabulously wealthy nor morally bankrupt. I am not a political dissident, an emigrant, or a war criminal. I am not a front line correspondent, a doctor, or a theoretician. I have no PHD.

I speak only one language. I have written no great works in my only language and I can neither draw nor paint worth a damn.

I am not marginalized or subjugated by my race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or class. I am middle-income.

I am not even particularly honest.

I am an average white American coward, standing paralyzed before this digital tsunami of misinformation, plutocracy, and bigotry. I am too appalled to thoroughly engage with the news. I am too alienated by my own self-interest to figure out how to contribute to an organized countermovement. I am too disinterested in politics and busy with the meaningless trappings of my own uninteresting life to do anything about it.

So why write, or more pointedly, why write anything for public consumption?

I am writing and sharing in an attempt to cauterize a spiritual wound - to cure an infection of ennui.

Average millennial that I am, I have consumed countless hours of media as a sedative, as palliative treatment for boredom, as an analgesic for the pain of being uncreative and unremarkable.

I am a supersoaked luffa sponge, disintegrating from over absorption. If I do not shed this waterweight through critique, I will separate from myself.

And so the project.

The project has been this: To listen to and review every piece of vinyl in my record collection in chronological order of its writing, performance, or release. I have about 350 records as of this writing, and the collection will continue to grow.

Before now, I’ve been focused on getting through it – Writing a brief summation of my sentiments on the work and the quality of the recording, giving it a 1-4 star rating and then moving on, trying to get through every record in some semblance of a “timely” manner.

But it’s that time constraint that is the death of us all. It’s the culture of “good enough” and “time to move on”- because there is an infinite amount of media to consume. I know that I have conflated the consumption of media with the accumulation of knowledge, and maybe you have as well.

I want to genuinely learn from this collection that I have haphazardly amassed.

So now the project is to go more slowly. As I move through each record, I will work to understand, write about, and share any mix of the musical, cultural, technological, economic, historical, or idiosyncratic circumstances that have led to the production and distribution of these pieces of recorded music, and ultimately to my possession and continued stewardship of these records.

Here is my collection, listed chronologically, as of May 22nd, 2025:

Full Length Albums

Compilations and Soundtracks