You never leave home without your iPod. You have a real relationship with your music, and your life unfolds to the soundtrack of your tunes on shuffle. But where do you turn when you're looking for newnot always recenttracks to add to your collection? Or for the female perspective on classic music debates, like Beatles vs. Stones? And who is going to tell you what you can learn from your crush's music collection? (If he's an overzealous Smith's fan, send him packing.) For years, you've been listening to men talk about music, but the woman's side of the story has been missing. Until now. In Record Collecting for GirlsCourtney Smith takes the mic and explores what music can tell women about men, and more importantly, about themselves. She riffs on a range of topics from Our songs and Your songs to the evolution of girl bands. She provides playlists for occasions that necessitate a finely crafted mix like making out or breaking up and gives readers tips for curating a real record collection. Finally, here is a voice that speaks womenbecause girls get their hearts broken and make mix tapes about it, too.

Courtney E. Smith has more than a decade of experience in the music industry. She spent eight years at MTV as a music programmer and manager of label relations, where she specialized in grooming upcoming bands, including Death Cab for Cutie, the Shins, and Vampire Weekend, among others.

Record Collecting For Girls	p. 1
Top Five Lists	p. 5
Where Have All The Girl Bands Gone?	p. 25
interlude. My Scrobble, Myself	p. 43
Making Out With Romeo And Juliet	p. 47
Guilty Pleasures	p. 67
The Smiths Syndrome	p. 85
Interlude: Give It to Me For Free	p. 101
Are We Breaking Up?	p. 103
The Next Madonna	p. 110
Interlude Music Blogs Are Just Dadaist Conversation	p. 139
Our Song, Your Song, My Song	p. 143
The Death Of The Record Collector	p. 157
interlude: Adventures In Second Life	p. 173
Rock 'N' Roll Consorts	p. 179
Beatles VS. Stones	p. 197
Final note Down The Music K-Hole	p. 213
Acknowledgments	p. 225
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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TOP FIVE LISTS

If you’ve read the bookHigh Fidelityor seen the movie, even
just for the sake of John Cusack, then you’ve been witness to the
art of the Top Five list. Music nerds everywhere delight in making
Top Five lists of obvious, obtuse, and obscure records tailored
to every categorization of music you could possibly imagine. I
am one of those nerds. When my mind begins to wander, I think
about what albums I could listen to if I were stuck on a desert island.
(Usually this train of thought ends with the realization that
I’d hate any album by the sixth straight year of listening to it.) Instead
of counting sheep to lull myself to sleep, I make a list of all
the songs I can think of about masturbation. (There are a lot.) I
keep a running tab of what I think are my favorite songs right this
minute vs. my most-played songs in iTunes vs. what’s accrued at
the top of my last.fm most-played list. I can’t seem to stop myself
from obsessively thinking about music.
I’ve always loved music, but I wasn’t always a music obsessive.
That started when I was a college student and worked at a radio
station in Dallas. I fell in with a group of music snob guys who
regularly debated topics like Blur vs. Oasis and whether Cat Power
was the cutest indie rock girl or just the craziest. The guys carried
on conversations as if they were characters straight out ofHigh Fidelity,
constantly judging and ranking music. It was obvious they
believed Nick Hornby’s adage that what you like is what you’re like,
and they were judging people based on their musical taste. Girls
were generally dismissed from their reindeer games. I can’t even
tell you the number of times I’d heard them say obnoxious things
like, “Yeah, she’s hot, but she likes Alanis Morissette, so you know
she’s kind of an idiot.” I didn’t want to be one of those girls who
was so easily disregarded, so I faked being knowledgeable enough
to pass muster. After listening to them make and revise their Top
Five lists, probably hundreds of times, I developed a list of shortcuts
for making a Top Five artists list. As time went on I added
requirements of my own, and before long I had a cheater guide
that helped me narrow in on my Top Five. When I don’t have the
whole history of released music at my fingertips, it makes my listmaking
more manageable, and the guidelines force me to take an
analytical look at my music collection.
These are strictly my rules, so if you feel like adding new criteria
or ignoring one of my standards to better reflect your own taste,
knock yourself out.
Except #3. Do not ignore rule #3. You’ll see why.
The most important thing is that your Top Five list reflects
your favorites and not what you think someone wants to hear. Dare
to be uncool.
Here’s my Top Five artists list right now:

1. Elvis Costello— British post-punk artist who
developed into a multi-genre music maven
2. R.E.M. — A thens, Georgia, college rock band that paved
the way for indie-to-mainstream success
3. Sleater-Kinney— Portland, Oregon, riot grrrl rock
band with a feminist agenda
4. Stevie Nicks — ’70s and ’80s songwriter with the
world’s most amazing stage costumes
5. Fiona Apple— the songwriting port in a world full of
breakup storms

Here’s how I got there . . .

Rule #1: You must own all the full-length albums
released by any artist in your Top Five.

The exceptions to this rule: greatest hits albums and anything
you’ve deemed to be a low point in an artist’s career. I see no reason
to clog up your record collection with either. Completists everywhere
just hissed through their teeth at me, but why would you
own a record you don’t enjoy, or multiple copies of songs you already
have? For decoration? When music collecting becomes obsessive-
compulsive disorder, it’s time for a new hobby.
I was late in discovering Elvis Costello, both late in my life and
late in his career. I think the first time I heard of him was when I
saw his video for “Veronica.” It was inexplicable to me in 1989, the
halcyon days of Debbie Gibson and Poison, why the video for “Veronica”
was on MTV so often. Costello seemed old even then, and
his video was set in a nursing home, so in my eyes it didn’t hold a
candle to Madonna’s video for “Express Yourself.” The video got
less airplay than Madonna’s, or even Paula Abdul’s, but he walked
away with the 1989 Best Male Video award for “Veronica,” because
respect for the man was due. (Paul McCartney co-wrote the
song, so double the respect.) The melody was catchy, but the lyrics
were a mystery, and I memorized them all wrong. I couldn’t figure
out what he was talking about, because the idea of a pop song
about an old lady with Alzheimer’s was unfathomable and unrelatable
to me at age twelve.
After “Veronica” in my discovery of Elvis Costello came “Alison,”
which had actually been released twelve years earlier — yes,
the same year I was born. I grew to love this one while listening
to my parents’ Elvis Costello greatest hits album, and if you don’t
know it, I recommend you buy it immediately. His unforgettable
delivery of the line “My aim is true” is a knee-buckler — the sort of
bittersweet sentiment that I dream of a guy writing for me in some
tragic soap-opera scenario where we can’t be together.
My family and I were big perpetrators of the Columbia House
scam. It was a great way to build a collection, considering that my
allowance was a mere $5 a week. We would all constantly join,
leave, and rejoin various mail-order companies that offered eight
albums for a penny if you bought three at full price. In college I
orderedThe Very Best of Elvis Costello & the Attractionsfrom one
of those clubs and found myself really getting into his clever lyrics.
His songs are so easy to fall in love with.
I went to the next level of Costello fandom when I bought the
Rhino re-issue ofThis Year’s Model. It was in the dead of winter at
the beginning of 2002. I had recently moved into an apartment in
Brooklyn and was consumed by a long-distance flirtation with a
boy in a band who lived in Dallas. He mailed me a loaf of honey
wheat bread (which was impossible to find in New York City) and
a packet of forget-me-not flower seeds, and he called me on the
phone nearly every day. I was totally crushed out. A few months
later, when his band toured through town, he explained to me that
it all meant nothing, that he was just a flirtatious person, and suggested
we should just be friends. It was infuriating, and I hated
him for stringing me along. Listening to the first track ofThis
Year’s Model, “No Action,” while stomping the cold, mile-long
walk from the subway through the housing project near my apartment
was the only time I felt like a rational, thinking person rather
than a girl who had been turned into a chump and who secretly
still had a little crush. It’s frustrating when someone treats you horribly,
but being a jerk back to them just doesn’t seem worth it. Instead
I pretended to be sternly nice and above it, but that farce left
me with a lot of anger to work out. Power-walking to a collection
of songs full of venom, vigor, and a dash of bitter longing got me
through that romantic humiliation and the feeling of annoyance
with myself for not telling him off. I didn’t get the guy, but I did
get Elvis Costello.
I quickly became a devotee. I still get chills listening to certain
turns of phrase in his songs. His albumWhen I Was Cruelcame
out the next year, and I tumbled head first into obsessively listening
to it, dissecting it. I saw him live three times. I worked my way
through most of his catalog over the next five years, first focusing
on his pop albums with the hits. I still discover new songs to
love when I re-explore those albums. Next I delved into his collaboration
with songwriter Burt Bacharach, his classical compositions,
and even his British TV program scores. The man has a giant
back catalog of material, and I’ll admit I cheated and put him
on my Top Five list before I owned everything. I’m still growing
into some of his work. I expect when I get older and tired of pop
music, Elvis Costello will still have something to offer me. I’m not
sure I can say the same for anyone else on my Top Five list.
Elvis Costello is my number one with a bullet because I want
to own all of his work and can’t get enough of listening to him.
That is how you should feel about the number one on your Top
Five. Number one becomes your family, your boyfriend, and your
comfort food. It’s indispensable.

Rule #2: Artists cannot be in your Top Five of all
time if they’ve only released one album.

Perhaps you feel you have intensely bonded with an artist who
only has one album. You may think you love them. You may put
them on your list of the top ten albums. However, it’s still too early
to give them a spot on your Top Five artists of all time. To me a favorite
artist is someone I have history with, a band that has earned
their place in my heart. I don’t take it lightly or include someone
on a whim. Besides, there’s a very high probability a new artist’s
second album could hit the sophomore slump hard and totally
suck. That’s what happened to those poor bastards the Strokes,
who made a hell of a great and timely first album and became
the leading band on the New York City (aka media capital of the
world) scene circa 9/11. How could they possibly have followed up
on that? They were damned from the moment they started making
a second album.
I distinctly remember the first time I really heard an R.E.M.
song.Eponymous, their first greatest hits album, had recently
come out, and my stepdad was blasting it on the stereo. He had
this amazing sound system that you could hear all over our small
house. I was in the TV room and remember being annoyed by the
music, but then “The One I Love” came on and I started listening
to it. Really listening. I’d heard the song before and seen their lo-fi
videos on MTV, but this time Michael Stipe’s voice and the dark,
swirling music of the song really hit me. I found myself adding it to
the mix tapes I made off my parents’ CD collection.
Aside from a passing fascination with “Orange Crush,” I
missed most of the excitement around their breakout hit album
Green. I thought “Pop Song ’89” was annoying and that they’d
made a stupid video. I was eleven at the time, and the artistic
merit was lost on me. I became a bona fide fan with the release
of 1991’s Out of Time, thanks not only to the giant hit “Losing My
Religion,” but also to Jane Pratt’s constant mentions of R.E.M. in
Sassy magazine. WhenAutomatic for the Peoplewas released in
1992 I was truly obsessed.
Somewhere along the way, Courtney Love stumbled into the
picture and started screaming at anyone who’d listen that Murmur
was one of the greatest albums ever, and so I found myself buying
up R.E.M.’s back catalog. As I started collecting R.E.M.’s early albums,
bootlegs, and singles, I gained an appreciation of how different
the R.E.M. albums of the ’90s were from those of the ’80s
and how they were changing as a band.Monster, New Adventures
in Hi-Fi, andUpare not in most rock critics’ canons of key R.E.M.
albums, but I enjoy each one because I like hearing the band
evolve and try new things. If R.E.M. had just made the same ’80s
jangle pop albums over and over (which they did for most of the
’80s, actually) then what would have been the point of continuing
to listen to them?
For years R.E.M. was number one on my list, and there are
two reasons why I bumped them down. The first is that their output
in the 2000s, save 2008’sAccelerate, has been phoned in. Even
the band has admitted as much. While doing press forAccelerate,
guitarist Peter Buck said toSpin magazine, “It was kind of like
the war in Iraq — we didn’t know why we got in [the studio], we
don’t know how to get out, and we don’t know what we’re trying
to accomplish. If [2004’sAround the Sun] had been the best record
we’d ever made and everyone said it wasPet Sounds, I could
put up with eight months in the studio and the frustration. But
it wasn’t.” Buck is right, because the seminal Beach Boys’ album
Pet Sounds was crafted with care and Brian Wilson’s killer intentions
of besting the Beatles. In fact, Wilson nearly had a nervous
breakdown when the Beatles took up his challenge and followed
Pet Soundswith their own release ofSgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band. One hardly gets the idea that R.E.M. was trying to
best even themselves with the records they made in the 2000s.
I’m all for growing and experimenting, which is why I’ll stand
by their critically panned late-’90s output, but as a fan I don’t appreciate
the release of material a band doesn’t care about but that
got recorded for the sake of money or running out a record deal. If
the magic’s not there anymore, the band should break up or take
a moment and pull itself together, not insult the fans with albums
they can barely be bothered to work on. Far too many bands stay
together past their sell-by date and ruin the value of their back catalog
by releasing progressively worse music as they get older. It’s
painful, and I couldn’t help but take it as a personal affront when I
realized one of my favorite bands might be doing exactly that.
The second reason for downgrading R.E.M. is entirely personal.
In the course of interning for and working at MTV, I attended
two interviews with R.E.M. Their obnoxious attitudes at
the tapings were a complete turn-off. Granted, I was very new to
the music industry then and did not yet understand that everyone
hates the interview circuit, where they’re asked the same five
questions about making their album over and over again for days
on end. They were clearly so unhappy to be doing the interviews
on both occasions that it turned into an unpleasant experience for
everyone involved. I found the band members to be rude, dismissive,
and arrogant. It was such a blow to my idea of them that I
couldn’t even listen to their records for two years. Meeting your
musical heroes is a real risk. Sometimes it is better not to look behind
the curtain.
R.E.M. remains at number two on my list for now, but my disappointment
in them has admittedly chilled the air between us.
We’ll see how it goes.

Rule #3: Update your Top Five list often.

This seems obvious, doesn’t it? I think a lot of people balk at creating
a Top Five list because they think they’ll have to stick by it forever.
You won’t. Your list is fluid and should be revisited as often as
necessary. You don’t ever have to feel like you’re married to a Top
Five. But I bet that once you’ve figured out a few of your core artists,
they’ll always be on your list. If you ask me to name my Top
Five again a year from now, it’s likely that I’ll have completely revised
it. Well, okay, Elvis Costello will still be number one, barring
any massive exposé of his life as a monster who eats babies.
But the other four slots are subject to revision.
I only recently realized that Sleater-Kinney had earned themselves
a place in my Top Five, knocking out longtime favorite Neil
Finn (a great New Zealand artist in his own right and the lead
singer for Crowded House and his brother, Tim Finn’s, band Split
Enz). I first checked out Sleater-Kinney after I saw their picture on
the cover of theDallas Observerin 1999 for the release ofThe Hot
Rock. I was a college student at the time, and finding female voices
in music felt important. I’d heard their name in conjunction with
the record label Kill Rock Stars, but I had never listened to their
music. Knowing only that they were a staunchly feminist band and
that two of the girls used to be a couple, I went out and bought a
copy of the album. I loved it. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein
screeched at each other through dual vocal performances that felt
immediate and angst-filled; after all, it was a breakup album full
of resentful songs. It quickly became one of my favorite albums of
that year.
I didn’t immediately buy their earlier albums, though, or feel
any particular need to. I picked upAll Hands on the Bad Onein
2000, and that was when their feminist message smacked me in
the face. It’s an album of songs about how it feels to be a woman in
a band, a woman in the music industry, and a woman in American
society. Those lyrics could have been ripped out of my head from
my own feelings about rock music at the time. Mainstream female
images are often watered down to focus on love and girly stuff.
This band wasn’t about that. These were the days after the riot
grrrl movement had cooled, when the only female-fronted rock
bands that could get on the radio were No Doubt and Garbage. I
was working at the alternative rock radio station in Dallas, and the
question of what female artists they played weighed heavy in my
consciousness every day. I interviewed the station’s music director
for a feature in my college paper and asked him why they didn’t
play more female artists. He explained that they thought too many
songs by women would alienate their predominately male listeners,
so they never played two female voices in a row and kept the
number of songs by women added into the rotation each week to
a minimum. The geniuses behind corporate radio were absolutely
sure men didn’t care to hear women singing.All Hands on the Bad
Oneconveyed how annoyed lots of women, myself included, felt
by the culture surrounding rock music in the late 1990s and early
2000s.
I’ve slowly accumulated all of Sleater-Kinney’s albums. I keep
going back to them when I need to reassure myself that other
women see what I see in our culture and that there is another point
of view outside of the hyper-sexualized pop tartlet or the acoustic
guitar hippie feelings girl, neither of which are my speed. Most
guys don’t realize how shortchanged women have been by the predominately
male retelling of music history. We’re segmented to
the level of specialty audience and programmed to in a cloud of
pink fairy dust. I don’t want another Rihanna. I want to know this:
Where’s the female equivalent of the Foo Fighters?
It’s taken a while for me to realize it, but Sleater-Kinney has
become the band I respect for their message and politics as well as
their music.
…