music for these college days?

Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow
Dylan - Blonde on Blonde, Blood on The Tracks, John Wesley Harding
Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love & Hate
Joni Mitchell - Court & Spark, Ladies of the Canyon
Palace - Day In The Wake
ROLLING FUCKING STONES - Sticky Fingers, Exile, Let It Bleed, Between The Buttons, Her Satanic Majesty's Request

word snob sez:
the next to last one, eh?

Autechre
Bardo Pond
Cocteau Twins
Dubstar
Labradford
Mobwai
Orbital
Sleater-Kinney

Also, I recently heard a dude and his girlfriend singing a line from "Jesus, Etc" to each other like it was somekind of revelation. The only other time I have witnessed similar behavior was with a Dave Mathews song and that was more funny than tragic.

But these same people also rate Coldplay, so we lose.

united states of america - s/t
steely dan - pretzel logic, katy lied, can't buy a thrill
black sabbath - the first six, but especially volume 4
royal trux - twin infinitives
neil young - after the goldrush, everybody knows this is nowhere

(the only ubiquitos ones on this list are the neil young & sabbath.)

2xpost: Ian, for real, the first 6 Sabbath albums are ubiquitous in your programme?

Well, that's still me circa now, a lot of the time. I think the TFUL282 connection was helped by the fact that I was going to school in the Bay area so I got to see them play a few times. But if you want to explore TFUL282, I'd recommend starting with Lovelyville. I can send you some tracks from it sometime if you're on AIM.

Aside from those 4 (which are pretty good choices), the first Barenaked Ladies album might come close around here AFAICT.

Honestly, though, these albums are only close to ubiquitous with white students.

I was listening almost exclusively to jazz coming into college -- the pattern began to break when I lived in a house with a bunch of hippies and finally started appreciating Bob Dylan. Hearing the Alan Lomax recording of "Songs from the Mississipi State Penitentiary" in the school record library was also a breakthrough for me, and I started to like Folkways-type stuff (so-called "Roots Music"). One thing that never rubbed off on me though was The Grateful Dead. I've come to appreciate them more lately, but only their studio recordings, not those god-awful noodle fests that everyone claims are what you have to listen to in order to "really" get The Dead.

small faces- odgens nut gone flake
meic stevens- outlander
millennium- begin
bowie- low
talking heads- more songs about bulidings and food

DFA compilation 2
scritti politti - i celebrate their whole catalog
vic goddard and subway sect - whats the matter boy?
chrome box
Swell Maps - jane from occupied europe (reissue replacing my shitty 96 bit mp3s)
Faust/So Far
Direct Effect for new hip-hop videos
the clipse album i just got for free
Tusk

tuner off the coldplay COLLEGE GOERS WHY DON"T U LIKE MY MUSIC YOU FUCKING PHILISTINES

I'm a global studies (read: international relations everywhere else) major but most of my friends are majoring in sociology and/or art/art history.

The Fall is popular because the '80s are popular. I listed albums I see frequently together, but that doesn't mean I'm implying most people have ALL of these albums. I'm saying the average college student (with alternative/punk leanings) probably has at least two or more of them.

I don't think this list fits Spin, either. I would categorize as post-punk. Most of these albums are 10+ years old. The point is not that they're popular but that they've had a chance to become classic.

Death Cab For Cutie has only been together two years, and I'd hardly call them universal, even for the indie scene. Pitchfork itself has only been around since...the mid-90s? They seem to cover one recently-emerged genre of music pretty exclusively...and that genre isn't doesn't even include the majority of legitimately independent music...so whatever.

I'm just asking for suggestions. The only band labeled boring so far has been Weezer, and I don't consider that a huge deal. What's the problem?

oh man, if only people listened to Joni Mitchell. It's considered "our parents' college music", sadly.

oh, and Sloan too. most people either have a Sloan record, or define themselves against having a Sloan record.

there are 10 of the listed albums up top that I've never heard. I own 6. you guess which.

Thanks for catching my reference. Actually, the school I went to (Rutgers) had one of the few women's colleges left in the US, and "Blue" was basically the soundtrack to their campus's cafe (mostly just that River song). This was so pervasive in fact, that I didn't discover what a great album it is until a few years later, because Mitchell was inextricably bound up in my mind with The Indigo Girls.

Joni Mitchell was the music of my high-school days. "Last Time I Saw Richard" is the best song on 'Blue', and maybe her first great song.

Why does university=college in the US? here, university=university and college=college. What does college= in the US, or do you not have a college system?

In the US university usually means graduate programs, research and the whole shebang whereas college just means four (or two) year degree program. But being "in college" or "going to college" refers to either of the two, for whatever reason.

Some things that I discovered on my own around that time, only starting to explore music:
Amon Tobin, GYBE, Mogwai, Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, Paik, Scott Herren, Do Make Say Think, Trail of Dead, MBV, Built to Spill, Pavement.

Not that this is really "music for college these days" in any particular way.

Some of the kids milling around the radio station will experiment in their tastes, some will think they're experimenting while accepting yet another musical formula, and others will keep listening to whatever their friends or commerical radio says. Claiming to have taste in music is often the same thing as claiming you have superior taste in music.

I don't contest that.

"I mean, for every indie act that tours college towns there's a Dave Matthews Band soundalike that's doing so as well."

What's this about? Those acts are not any better than Daves Matthews by virtue of being "indie," whatever that means II've seen the term applied to plenty of bands that aren't independently produced). If you meant the latter definition...the point still holds. Those bands could still be crap as any manufactured one is.

i fucking hate the smiths, btw

http://www.bju.edu/prospective/expect/rhall

Note the second bullet under "What Not to Bring" in particular.

I was just saying that picking specific things that I might listen to seems rather arbitrary. Fitting the "campus milieu" or whatever just means finally being able to get away from all the nu-emo--which may fit the suburban environment but doesn't seem to work city-wise--that's ubiquitous at my high school and listening to more indie/dance-oriented music than I do now. 'course that's ignoring the roommate factor.

college was all about bjork, dudes

yea, bjork was in my circle and for me esp.

stuff that was really big at my school (this was like 02-06, at american u in DC):

talib kweli
mos def
radiohead
elliott smith
neutral milk hotel

for some reason i remember people listening to those five especially, all the time

Did you live in the "NO POP GLITTER DORM" or something.

oh man my college was all phish and gear daddies and abba. my radio show did little to change this, sadly.

big at my school:

AC/DC
Metallica
Jerry Jeff Walker

b/c it was fucking TEXAS man

College at California:

Red Hot Chili Peppers
Sublime
Random RHCP soundalike
Random Sublime soundalike
Random pop hits of the year
Random hip hop hits of the year

hmmm i went to 0berlin.......can't really sum anything up, shit was so all over the place.

I went to a small Midwestern liberal arts school in the late '90s, so basically a bunch of Lilith Fair stuff.

wondering if it was the same small Midwestern liberal arts school i went to in the early/mid '90s.

Nope, though I do know someone who graduated from there in 2001.

ooh oh also lots of Boards of Canada

Graduated 2004 in the UK. The students who thought they were into music listened to a lot of Radiohead, Joy Division, Jeff Buckley, the Smiths, Muse, Pink Floyd, etc and liked to frequently disparage "rap" and "dance" music. Depressing stuff.

i went to byu (mormon school) so ... plenty of efy (especially for youth) compilations and christian acoustic singer/songwriters but more typical college stuff circa 2000 than you'd expect. i was like all radiohead all the time, my roommate (best friend from h.s.) was really into sonic youth, bjork, random indie rock. oh and we were "discovering" IDM lol

yea i totally did a radiohead --> idm transition after kid a. ha

Hey how is rap and dance music thought of class-wise in the UK? It seems like uni would be the time to at least superficially embrace the trappings of swarthy lower-class culture.

re: byu is there a distinct mormon-core subgenre? or was that discouraged as not assimilating?

see this is weird, because the more i look at that initial list, the more i'm like: that seems more like a list from 2001 or so, not 2004. when i look back at my first semester of college in 03, the peeps i knew who were into music were into..

Stereolab
Phiiliip
Sonic Youth (this is never gonna change, i don't think)
Boards of Canada
Miss Kittin & the Hacker
Pavement
Oneida
!!!
the Avalanches (woooo that was interesting)
Deerhoof

starting to be looked down upon:
Wilco
GBV
Low

etc.

by 04, i pretty much listened to Low, Devendra's first album, NNCK, Stars of the Lid, and Fennesz.

I'm on a big state college campus for the next 10 days. I went to a college bar with some classmates last night. I don't know if the music was a jukebox or just a radio or mix, but in the <2 hrs we were there, I heard "Man in the Box" by Alice in Chains twice. I also heard two Radiohead songs back to back (Creep and Paranoid Android), Sweet Home Alabama, and a bunch of other old crap; they played nothing I recognized as new (ie from the past five years) while I was there. I really have no idea why an 18 year old would want to listen to this stuff in 2009. Why do they want to hear "Man in the Box" so bad?

stereolab otm.

Why do they want to hear "Man in the Box" so bad?

it's oddly comforting to know that rock radio hasn't moved from where i last left it