Yes I am male and deeply into the cataloguing and ordering of stuff. Following on from the several threads on cataloguing, how does the anal tendency manifest itself in actually listening? Confessions follow...
1. I'm currently listening to my entire CD collection in strictly alphabetical order - am up to E so it's Echo and The Bunnymen, Echobelly, Electronic etc. after deciding that was the only way to ensure I listened to everything.
2. Strict genre rotation: indie, dance, rock, reggae, soul etc - Ac/Dc followed by Thin Lizzy is not good. Varied diet you know. (this is challenging to maintain with the alphabetical)
3. New albums to be listened to at least twice before being allowed in the main collection...
Album Level:
1. In albums with 4 great singles and a load of filler (hello Madonna and most pop) I have been known to change the play order to filler first, killer last - ie you only deserve pudding after finishing your sprouts.
2. Greatest Hits are the audio equivalent of sticky toffee pudding and must be strictly rationed. They're bad for you you know.
3.Vinyl legacy habit: a CD isn't 12 tracks, it's 2 sides of 6 tracks. If you have to stop listening to a CD then do make it when you'd have to get up and turn the album over.

Historical anal listening - as a teenager would listen to stuff with the lights off, and even lying on the floor with my head between the speakers.... to get closer to the music.

So let's get those anal listening habits out into the open. What new forms of anality are enabled by the ipod - my only one here is that shuffle is what the pod was born for. Track one of 7,563 is how you should start.

I have a (presumably) early pressing of The Who's Live At Leeds with a quite fabulous and bizzarre set of free give-aways,that for some reason I dug out last week. Included were: copies of contracts, press photos, the bands accounts as the High Numbers which reveal they earnt £25 from playing the Majestic Luton, letters from EMI, and a delivery note from Brock's Fireworks. Even if all mocked up specially who wouldn't want these to peruse as you listened to Magic Bus and imagined yourself as Kit Lambert.
Other freebies in the vinyl mausoleum I could lay my hands on included:
Pop Will Eat Itself - Get The Girl, Kill the baddies - free graffiti stencil
Psychedelic Furs - Pretty In Pink 12" - Free T-Shirt
I seem to recall my dad's copy of Sargeant Pepper containing cardboard cut-outs...or was that my imagination? His White Album definitely had some colour photo prints of the fab four...

Clearly the vinyl era was the golden age of the freebie (Strictly Limited Edition of course) and the CD era seems to have reduced this to a ho-hum DVD with the compulsory live tracks. Now with downloads the freebie is surely an endangered species. Anyway, what's your best and worst freebies with an album/single you've actually gone out and bought...

Am I dreaming? Or did Dr Pepper really offer to buy everyone in America a drink of their (insert comment here) tasting soft drink if Chinese Democracy appears in 2008. Some April fool mishtake surely, but this missive is dated from late March on the GNR website:

March 26, 2008

Press Release from Axl Regarding Dr Pepper
We are surprised and very happy to have the support of Dr Pepper with our album "Chinese Democracy," as for us, this came totally out of the blue. If there is any involvement with this promotion by our record company or others, we are unaware of such at this time. And as some of Buckethead's performances are on our album, I'll share my Dr Pepper with him.

Axl Rose

I thought of this in connection with the waiting for the new lp thread but thought it so good it needed a new one. How can we encourage our rock stars to meet their production quotas? Clearly soft drinks are doing it for Axl, how about some babysitting and a nice cup of tea for Ms Bush, or a supermarket sweep round the Apple store for Kraftwerk?

Saturday mornings chez nous include a ten-minute car journey to the kids swimming lesson, on which they insist on listening to Kerrang! (they are disturbingly aged 4 and 6...) Anway, last week in between the emo fare we start listening to a track and the conversation between me and my partner goes a bit like this 'Who's this then?' ' Dunno, it's a bit gothy' 'Sounds like a bloody Bauhaus b-side' 'Without the tune'...and so on. The dj then comes on an announces it's the new Supergrass single. Noooo..not the loveable britpop veterans, tickets to go see being pinned on our kitchen noticeboard for the current tour. So when has your innate desire to instantly analyse and dismiss led to a slightly entertaining double-take once the act is revealed -even better if their mum was in the room as you came over all critical...

Some albums beg to be listened to - if you'd never heard Ziggy Stardust the combination of that name and the fabulously booted and cat-suited DB on the cover would get your ears twitching, turn it over and the titles...Moonage Daydream, Suffragette City, Rock and Roll Suicide...who could pass this by.

But what about those albums where everything you read and see before putting it on should send you running a mile....recently I've been listing to a couple of albums that should be so wrong. First up Jehovahkill by Julian Cope. The name, the song titles, (No Hard Shoulder To Cry On, Necropolis, the fact that The Tower is 13 mins long), then go inside and we've got essays about ancient Serpent Mounds and some of Mr Cope's poems...

So, imagine my surprise, not having listened to it in ten years ,when it turns out to be a corker. Poppy, melodic, rocky in the right places...okay the lyrics are still a bit challenging but I could honestly recommend it.

Second up, dredged from the DJ mixes a bog-standard mid-90s double Farley and Heller mix, Anthology. Silver box, no info, the very phrase 'Double CD compilation mixed by Farley and Heller' Again, a completely listenable funky, soulful house mix that had the family bopping around the kitchen.

So what is the all-time worst mismatch between the cover and the contents? What has to get past its own artwork to work?