Whoopsie daisy. So I guess it’s been over four months since
we last posted. Time sure does fly when you’re trying to cope with one monster
of a semester. We usually suck around finals, but a whole semester is pretty
unacceptable.
But since there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s time to
just accept it and try and move on. So we’re going to try and really kick ass
this summer to make up some ground. First up is the idea we left off on.
Zack: Ranking things is fun. There seems to be an
innate human desire to make top-ten’s and other such lists. No one is guiltier
of fetishizing this base human instinct than us. Alright, maybe fetishizing
wasn’t the optimal word there, but you get the idea. Anyway, one of my favorite
things to do is the “Mount Rushmore” approach. Basically, you assume that
they’re going to be building a Mount Rushmore of something and you need to
select the four people to be represented.
Here’s an example: NBA centers. For me, it’s Wilt, Kareem,
Bill Russell, and Shaq. Notice how there isn’t an honorary mentions section.
There can’t be. The Mount Rushmore model forces you to set a hard cap at four
and you can’t break it. There has to be a very thick line drawn. I’m not
allowed to say “well Moses, Duncan, and Olajuwon were all like PF/C so they
have to be considered.” Nope. It’s just Wilt, Kareem, Russell, and Shaq.
This is actually even
harder than you’d imagine. The Mount Rushmore model also carries with it a
sense of immortality. You can’t pick two people who had very similar
games/legacies/whatever because what if history judges one to be a lite version
of the other. The four need to be at least minimally different so that, if
someone gazing upon the majestic stone monument years down the road doesn’t
agree with one of the choices, at least they can say, “but he was the most
[insert adjective].”
Getting back to music, I like to apply the Mount Rushmore
model to the great classic rock bands. My four is The Beatles, The Rolling
Stones, The Who, and The Kinks. I can safely say that, having talked about this
with quite a few people, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a single person
who agrees with me. But if they want to express their own opinions, they can go
start their own blogs. So here’s what we’re going to do; we’re going to review
an album by each band. And by “we,” I don’t mean just Emily and me. We’ve
brought in two guest bloggers for this. Emily’s close childhood friend, Matt
Brune, and my ex-coworker and friend (making an encore, no less), Matt Henry.
All four of us will write reviews for each album, rank the four bands based on
those albums, and write a synopsis of why/how they came to that decision. And
who knows. If there’s a clear consensus, maybe I could be convinced to change
my Mount Rushmore bands. Haha, just kidding.
