INTRODUCTION
There are a great many music sites and blogs out there, not least our own Green Inc, discussing, debating, pondering and praising every genre, sub-genre, micro genre, album, even specific songs. But as far as we’re aware, there’s never been a site dedicated to the complete history of modern music culture, certainly not one that’s easily digestible. As from January 5th, our intention is for A Year In Playlists to be that site, a kind of pocket book guide to the past seven decades, from post war R&B to the present day, all squeezed into 52 weekly instalments.
Over the coming year, we’re going to create an alternative version of all those accepted histories propagated by the plethora of ‘learned’ rockbloke types telling us what we should be listening to. A Year In Playlists is our attempt to steal music criticism back from such nerdy geeks, with their classic albums and obscurist B sides, who’ve been doing their best to ruin it for the rest of us for far too long.
We want to sideline a trad rock culture that not only ignores huge swathes of black and electronic music, but is strangled at birth by an overbearing reverence for the sixties and sacred cows like The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Dylan and Neil fucking Young. In the real world, music culture belongs to the shared memory of pop lovers like you and I who have plenty of other things going on in ‘busy’ lives immeasurably brightened by a song, a chorus, a voice, a lyric, a dance, a soundtracked memory. And that’s how it should be.
Like most folks, I first started buying records in my pre-teens. Since then my life has been a gargantuan, all enveloping binge of pop, glam, punk, hip hop, indie, techno, acid house, electronica and all point’s inbetween. Over the past decade my iPod has been a constant companion, forty plus years of memory wrapped neatly in my little black box. Thousands of songs that have informed every part of my life no matter how randomly.
Some have changed the way I think, some have changed the way I dress, while many have just been there for me when I've woken up in the morning or come home from work. By arranging a thousand or so for A Year In Playlists, I hope to tell a story - both personal and general - about where music has taken us and more importantly why?
Chris Green
A few rules we set ourselves:
1) Barring any unforeseen disasters, one new playlist will be posted every week for the next 52 weeks.
2) Each playlist will feature one genre or time period and only one track per artist.
3) No track will appear more than once during the entire 52 weeks.
4) Each playlist will be timed to fit either a CDR 80 or C90 cassette. We know such things are irrelevant these days but compiling neat 80 minute packages tends to focus the mind and edit out the crap.
5) As many tracks as possible will feature on each playlists Spotify player. Unfortunately, in some cases this will be pitifully few as contrary to popular belief, some of the bigger names and many of our less known selections are still unavailable. However, they are all out there somewhere. Soulseek and you shall find!
6) If you think there’s anything we’ve missed that should be here let us know. We may not take any notice but then again we might. Email.
A Year In Playlists is engineered and administered by Dan Green