Dessert Island Disco, Day Zero

You've heard of Desert Island Discs, right? Where you're crashed on a deserted island and somehow you had the foresight to bring along some music and something to play it on (or maybe you just brought the music and then constructed something from coconut shells, bamboo and assorted monkey parts to play it on after you'd tried to establish some semblance of civilization but before you all went crazy and killed and ate each other because the pig's head told you to?) and what would that music be?

This question, what music I'd listen to forever in an island prison/paradise, has always haunted me ever since the concept was introduced to me via that free magazine Tower Records used to put out, Pulse! (I don't think I was the target audience for that magazine, although I inhaled it every time I got my nerdy little paws on it. There was always a lot of Steely Dan - which I thought was a typo for Steely Dawn, which is a much more evocative band name, BTW - on those lists. Judging solely by that criteria, I suspect it was intended for middle-aged high school band teachers/music store employees. Or just any guy with ponytail and/or mustache.)

It's a heavy, personality-revealing question, what ten records you'd listen to until you died from dehydration/infection/getting smashed against a tree by a crazy smoke monster. You know, typical island danger. It requires some soul-searching, this D.I.D. thing. I mean, it's just those 10 albums! (I realize that Wiki says it's eight pieces on the BBC show, but they don't figure in inflation, plus that's probably in Metric and I'm not exactly sure how to convert that to English measurements, especially with the dollar performing so poorly in foreign markets so I'm just gonna go with 10 pieces. Roll with it.) That's it! They've got to be perfect! No filler here!

At 15 years old and with as many CDs in my library, I was still figuring out where the boundaries of my taste lie (let's put it this way: you probably couldn't have played lawn darts in those boundaries, let alone full-contact football) and was odiously ill-equipped to make these type of decisions.This is no game for children. This is serious business. Now I'm not saying my tastes are football-field-sized as of now, but I think I am maybe in a better position to make these hard decisions, knowing full well that any list I make is instantly outdated and subject to change given the day, week, or temperature. This idea was unfathomable to the teenaged me who feared that such a list, once set, was set infinitely. But I'm not so nuts now. Or at least a different kind of nuts.

For the next ten days, I will be posting one Desert Island Disc* here on the good ole' blog. Feel free to tell me I'm crazy in the comments section, start your own list on the Forum or, if you decide to do something similar on yr blog, lemme know and I'll link to it. Cool? The first installment will be crashing-landing later today. Watch out for debris.

*******

* This list is in no way definitive and may change due to any whim by its creator. This list is the intellectual property of Big Red Robot, Inc. a subsidiary of BloodCo, a Martian Overlord company. Martian Overlord: "Quietly enslaving the human race through covert means since we first laid eyes on your puny planet." ™ & © 2008.