Dead Milkmen "Instant Club Hit"

I was thinking about other people's record collections---I do that sort of thing.

You can often learn a lot about someone from the contents of their record collection. That is, if they are the kind of person who buys a fair number of albums.

But what about the folks who don't buy a lot of music---generally, they are somewhat inscrutable via their record collection, because a) there's not a lot of data to be mined, and b) they tend to have the same handful of albums.

I mean, if you are my age and you went to college in the late 80s/early 90s and you had a friend who only had 10 CDs, odds are pretty good that their record collection contained, several, if not all of the following:

Bob Marley/Legend
Boston/Boston
Steve Miller Band/Greatest Hits
Paul Simon/Graceland
R.E.M./Out Of Time or Green
Something by The Beatles
U2/The Joshua Tree
Van Halen/1984
Prince/Purple Rain
INXS/Kick

In other words, they probably owned some pretty conventional, crowd-pleasing, easily-consumed records.

Which is why my girlfriend's best friend was a bit of a mysterious anomaly.

She literally only had about 10 cassettes, but they were the kinds of albums that you weren't going to run into by accident. Hip stuff that you didn't really hear on the radio, or blasted from speakers at a frat party. Music that you would have to dig to find.

And if you were the kind of person who would dig to find music, in theory, you'd have to be passionate enough about it, to want to get more than just 10 cassettes worth.

Her entire music collection didn't fill a shoebox, but it was through her that I learned the phrase, "You'll dance to anything by The Communards!"


Hear the song on Grooveshark.