world album

[martintho]

this world album of the day business, i regret to say, i find it ridiculously absurd and even patronising. what is a world album? according to this site it is an album produced in a different country than the three or four or slightly more english-speaking ones. please get rid of this. good intentions gone very wrong.

[Guest]

Without it, the only albums that will be selected for album of the day would be from those english-speaking countries. The "world" version of album of the day helps expand the focus of this website a bit, although I believe more could be done to do so.


If it does become agreed upon that world album of the day is too degrading to keep, then I hope a better solution is made in its place.

[albummaster]

The idea for WAOTD originally came from this thread. I agree, not every day sees an album everyone agrees with, but browsing through the history, there's some good variety. Also, some very decent albums would never get highlighted if WAOTD didn't exist (something that The Poe was alluding to - these albums generally don't have as big a profile as AOTD). Maybe the 'world album' title is misleading, but even that was given quite a bit of thought in the thread that I linked to above.

Personally, I'm in favour of keeping this going as, even if I've never heard of some of the albums, quite often people chip in with positive comments which leads me to trying them out. A great example for me recently was E2 E4 by Manuel Gottsching which I absolutely loved after reading some of the comments. I'm sure I'm not the only person that has found this useful for discovering albums slightly out of the mainstream.

[sp4cetiger]

My feelings about this are... complex, but I think I can understand where the OP is coming from. I also found the practice very strange when I first came to the site.

For the experienced music listener, I can certainly understand the desire to have variety in the album of the day selections. As AM and The Poe said, it's a good way to give attention to quality albums that wouldn't necessarily see chatter under normal circumstances. Also, as someone who is big on understanding music in the context in which it was made, the "World" albums would seem to add perspective that one couldn't get from The Beatles or U2.

The problem is that the practice inherently implies that national boundaries are somehow a key factor in determining the legitimacy of music relative to the user rankings on this site. I understand that the "World" album was an attempt to counteract the bias towards English-speaking artists on a website that's written in English, but this bias is perfectly natural and any reasonable visitor should be able to understand it. What's more, many of the World albums are performed in English -- why should a Bjork album be highlighted over one from Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart?

Even further, most of the World albums are not foreign in any meaningful sense of the word. They are created in a global context, usually including heavy influence from American and British music. They may contain echoes of a subculture that doesn't exist in other parts of the world, but such underrepresented subcultures can be just as easily found on the streets of New York or London.

I think we could do something less arbitrary, but keeping the variety of the World album selections, by just replacing them with an "Expert Pick of the Day." For this, AM could randomly select an album from the chart of one of the site's high-ranking users (such as The Poe), perhaps filtering out anything that's in the top 400 albums or so. For an idea of the kind of selections this would result in, see this excellent thread:

Promoting your favorite albums

[martintho]

sp4cetiger: very well put. call it something else. world album is something else; it's commonly used on albums with third world artist in 'em. and even this tag is highly disliked by david byrne and myself.

[Guest]

[martintho]

browsed the history just now AM, and of course, many temptations there. but daft punk, bjørk, bob marley? simply because of what? i don't quite like the smell of this. again i see the good intention. and THE POE: it's easy to find gems yourselves in this wonderful world of brilliant music lovers. just browse a couple of lists and there you go. we don't need no teacher doing that for us? those who seek to find shall surely find (or whatever)

[martintho]

sp4cetiger

[Guest]

[Cymro2011]