One of the things I’ve decided I’m going to do this year is to broaden my experience of music. I tend to fall back on the same genre’s and artists that I know I like (and have liked since I was old enough to have an interest in music). I do like music outside this range, but it’s rare that I’ve bought (or listened) to any albums that fall away from my usual tastes.

So, to do something about this, I’ve compiled a list of albums that I have (mostly*) never listened to before – currently standing at almost three hundred strong – with the plan to choose one at random each week. I built my list by aggregating several “Best Albums of All Time”-type charts, removing the duplicates, and then adding in some other stuff that wasn’t on these lists but which I fancy listen to (I’ll probably keep adding extra titles as they occur to me). The full list covers a pretty wide range or genres and artists.

I set up a random number generator in Excel and assigned each album a number, and I’m using this method to choose each week’s selection so hopefully I’ll get a good mixture of stuff.

For week one of the endeavour the wheel of fortune certainly delivered, giving me an album in a genre that I’ve never considered listening to before: Gangsta Rap!

So week one’s album choice has been Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A.

Turns out that I actually like the album. There’s a real power to it, both in the emotional impact, and also the excellent production. There’s a lot of violent language, and quite a bit of misogyny (and some homophobia) in there too, which I’m not going to condone (although the profanity doesn’t bother me particularly and it’s easy to see how the music’s angry driving force was brought into being), but I’ve listened to the album several times during the week and even sought out the biopic movie too. I don’t like every track on the album (but that’s the case for most albums, if I’m honest), but the ones I do like are pretty great. Off the back of this, I’ve added a bunch of other rap albums to my list.

Tomorrow I’ll spin the wheel again and get another set of songs to consume. Who knows what I’ll get next time?

I chose today’s photo as it felt (very loosely) connected to the contents of the post, albeit not photographed in Compton. 🙂

Canon Sure Shot Z135 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted using Negative Lab Pro.

Taken 5 November 2023.