Paper Monitor
12:18 UK time, Tuesday, 20 November 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Now here's a format that you’re unlikely to see in the Daily Telegraph – "1,000 [fill in the blank] before you die".
With its infinitely younger audience the Guardian has no such worries, hence this week's six-part supplement "1000 albums to hear before you die".
Excuse Paper Monitor for taking the Guardian strictly at its word on this occasion, but *1,000* albums!
Even rating the playing time of each one at a relatively slender 40 minutes each – the average length of an old LP – and discounting double albums and box sets (Bob Dylan's 3-CD Biograph being a case in point), that still weighs in at a total listening time of 666.66 hours, or 28 straight days of listening, uninterrupted by such trivial pastimes as sleeping, working, reading the papers etc.
And then there's the cost. Again, taking an arbitrary £7.99 average for a new album, that comes in at a rather credit crunch-unfriendly total of £7,990.
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Is the Guardian implying that readers might come across these albums in a more nefarious manner? Downloading from the file-sharing networks for examples? Or ripping them from friends' CDs?
Whatever the practicalities, the point of this series is of course a chance for the paper to showcase the sheer breadth of its cultural embrace – from Ali Farka Toure to Duran Duran; Brandy to the Albert Ayler Trio.
But Paper Monitor is undaunted, feeling the Guardian has been a little mean capping its list at 1,000. In this era of cultural relativism, darn, isn't every album ever released just a beautiful manifestation of aural statement? Coming soon in the Monitor: "3,456,501 albums to hear when you become a ".
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