The project was inspired by the book '1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die' (Dimery, 2010). The authors recommend a list of classic songs that they believe are a must to hear before you die and their list became the guide for a series of 2hr shows devised for radio broadcast.
By the end of the 2nd broadcast, I had begun to ask myself what was achieved by repeating and reiterating the list of established songs found in the book. I began to question what the role or aim of the book was, and I asked myself what did the book seek to produce and maintain? I realised that the book and the radio show acted only to reaffirm and harken back to earlier days, to recall and reminisce about these times. The book sought to remind us of and evoke the potency of these times, to relive this, to maintain their brilliance. As such the radio show and book could be seen as objects of recognition whose function was to reaffirm the known, the habitual, to conserve and continue the acceptable. I decided that I either had to change the format of the show or stop it. There was a possibility for producing an alternative playlist, one which would play lesser-known rather so-called essential tracks. I began thinking about which songs I would really want to hear before I died and realised that these would be songs that I had never heard before. As a consequence rather than playing songs that I had never heard before became the format for the weekly show and each week the playlist for the show was a selection of tracks taken from new album releases.
 |
| Week 20 - 474 to 498 |
>