Cheezeball.net's "Cheezeball 16 (or Explaining alt-country in 16 LP's)"
Our first idea was to pick our favorite sixteen alt.country albums, and call it a day. We were soon questioning the merits of endorsing an entirely idiosyncratic collection, however, and thus decided to shift our focus from our "favorite" albums to the "best" sixteen alt.country record ever made (in our ever-so-humble estimation). Equally idiosyncratic, perhaps, but we soon had a list. To our ultimate dismay, however, the list contained but eight artists, and most of the sixteen albums were released in the mid-1990s. Perhaps a list of the "best" alt.country albums, we realized, was not the best way to construct a generic primer.
Finally, we decided that the most productive way to give a snapshot of the genre would be to select strong albums (consensus "best" or "near-best") from a wide variety of alt.country-ish artists (fifteen in all) and to attempt to distribute the selections evenly over the sixteen year period from 1990 to 2005.
Our attempts at uniform chronological distribution were not entirely successful, for in the end, we favored the music over the release dates. Nevertheless, we have compiled a list of albums spanning from 1990 to 2004 that we feel would make an excellent listening guide for anyone wishing to work their way through the alt.country genre in sixteen discs.
So, without further ado, our Near-Perfect Boxed Set:
Comments