Oct 30 2003

The UK's Guardian has put to text the kind of lists that seem pretensious in their use of extreme word choice. Guardian, with proper British restraint, simply calls these their homegrown list The top 40 bands in Britain today but resorts to the absolute term 'greatest' for The 40 greatest US bands today.

Not surprisingly, there's quite a few on both lists, even the US one, that I haven't heard of before. Tonight might be a good night to tempt the RIAA's wrath, fire up KaZaA Lite, and fill up a few CDs.

A few years back, a magazine at Barnes & Noble caught my eye. Witty, classy, Q Magazine had a big price tag but it came with a 'best music of 1999' CD. I was happily impressed with the tunes and the text, but the subscription rate (over $100 US?) is out of my league and delivery to the Fargo media outlets is small and spotty. I've flipped through it a couple times, scared off by it's $8 or $9 newsstand price, but I miss the view from the UK. There's something just a little different, something non-Clearchannel, something more akin to my tastes.

For a while, I'd check out the Top 40 charts for foreign countries, downloading the interesting things, but it became a bit tiresome to find so much Timberlake, Madonna, Creed, Blur, and their contemoraries on the Japanese and French charts. Hopefully I can pull enough from this Guaradian list to satisfy my taste for unique music until the next time I run across a 'greatest' list.