Definitive?

I'm as much a pop-music geek as anybody--OK, any music if you judge from my listening journal! So when I saw a mention in the newspaper about a Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame (RRHOF) "list" of the 200 definitive recordings of rock and roll, you know my list-making little heart was determined to find it right away.

So what is the "Definitive 200"? It's not a public service from the RRHOF, suggesting the 200 finest or most-influential recordings as you might expect. The link I've provided you is to the press release on the RRHOF site, rather than the official site for the Definitive 200. The official website--and the list--are provided to you by the RRHOF and the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM). It's little more than the retailers' effort to get you to buy this list of 200 purchase suggestions, presumably on CD at your local brick-and-mortar music store.

Of course, given the declining health of this particular group of merchants, they didn't go to a lot of trouble to combine obscure genius with the real crown jewels of the art. Most readers will recognize 90% of the artists easily and geeks like me will know every single artist and be familiar with most of the albums. And what do you get? Some obvious choices, such as The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Nirvana's Nevermind, and some choices that are hard to explain from the RRHOF. Certain choices are hard to explain based on category alone: the blind light-classical singer, Andrea Bocelli, has his Andrea is on this list along with the orchestral soundtrack from the movie Titanic. If you know much about these things, you may also see a serious problem with the latter two titles. They're not very good music, but they are very, very popular.

While the first 20 titles on this list are at least defensible choices, my eye leaps immediately to choice #21 on the list: Come On Over by Shania Twain. This was a monster hit, naturally, and engaging as a pop-country bonbon, but #22 is the Who's legendary Who's Next. The placement here implies that the people who compiled the list saw this Shania Twain disk as better than any album ever released by Stevie Wonder, The Who, Miles Davis, Jay-Z, and Beck. There are additional titles that lead me to scratch my head on here. Kenny G and Enya both make this list, along with Celine Dion. All of these choices, plus the cast recording of the Broadway show Phantom Of The Opera, show the true motivation clearly: to remind any reader, regardless of his or her general music-listening inclinations, to run right out and consume!

This shameless list is precisely the sort of self-indictment of the major music industry components--labels, retailers, and radio--that we've come to expect from them. From their perspective, the love of music is as irrelevant to what they do as the love of good food is irrelevant to a McDonald's manager. They need to move product and it really doesn't matter if it's fries or disks. It doesn't matter if the music or fries are healthful for the soul or body, they only care if the margins are right and the volumes meet their quarterly sales goals. There's no passion or love in this industry's big players and what they sell reflects that. Nobody really gets excited about the Titanic soundtrack, do they?

Sadly, the small, independent music labels and retailers who still love this stuff and haven't forgotten about good music are tied to the same economic model. I don't think anybody knows what the next life for music recordings will look like, but it has to be an improvement over this.

CDs listened to today:

• Stephen Suber: Enchantments: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
• Various Artists: Jump 'n' Jive
• Jesus Guridi: Sinfonia Pirenaica
• Rami Levin: Anima/Breath Of Life
• Bill Watrous: A Time For Love
• stellastarr*: (eponymous)
• Gyorgy Ligeti: Requiem
• Lightning Bolt: Hypermagic Mountain