However good part of it may be...

I adore the tracks Sign your name and Wishing well, but nevertheless impose a firm ban on any Terence Trent D'Arby albums.

Unjust though it may seem, I can't help but feel that they just aren't necessary.

Buying a lame album for the sake of one or two tracks is a practice that I don't condone, as it suggests a tendency to settle for second best.

(I might allow the album with Sign your name actually.)

As for INXS, I am happy to see Kick and X, and maybe one more, although latter-day pre-dodgy-death (and pre-Terence for that matter) material isn't quite so good.

Old Records Off the Shelf

Thankyou to the lovely Marc and the ever delightful Pete for contribution rights to the world of the Embarrassing LPs.

Sadly, they are really going to find out the true meaning of those two words now that I'm here.

You see, being Mrs Old, I had the misfortune of my formative teenage years (when one's true taste in music is developed, naturally - none of this playing Bach in the womb business, it's all about puberty) being smack bang in the 80s. Which means a) a fake drum beat will always sound good to me b) hair must always be vertical.

Anyway, nobody's mentioned anything about the Rolling Stones, The Who or Pink Floyd (have they?)

Retro cool? or Old Time Rock 'n' Roll Nobody Takes Those Drugs Anymore, So Who Cares?

West Coast nights

Having thought more about the R'n'B issue, I have concluded that a distinction needs to be drawn between LA sound, British R'n'B and plain lame mass produced American radio fodder.

All of this because I can kind of dig Sade.

I would allow up to 2 Sade albums and a scattering of the first two categories. There might be a fourth category, containing for example the likes of Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott, but then we bring up the whole hip hop blurred boundary thing again and I get all confused.

I guess at the end of the day, the R'n'B motto just needs to be "proceed with caution," and ultimately I will only decide what is OK once I actually see the CD collection in question.

Ambient works for ambient places and cafes

I was going to write a post on the dangers of R'n'B but found that it became complex.

As a general rule, there should be none.

But I would like to pose a question about abstract minimalist electronica. Lately I have been listening to a lot of pretentious techno and the like (the sort of thing which is recorded in lighthouses and wherever), which is not to say that I want to see it in a CD collection.

I always judge things by their covers, and feel that this type of album really tends to 'pretty up' a CD stack, so there is value in that. But, regardless of beautiful package design, if someone has too many CDs of droning 7 minute 'works' I start questioning who they are, what they are and why they are doing it.

Marc, perhaps it is you who should allocate figures to this genre of music. How many is not too many?