USA Today had a pretty cool feature about the Best Boxed Sets, which features a number of slightly odd, but interesting sounding box sets of music and movies. If you want to try something new, there are plenty of new things to discovery on the USA Today Best Box Sets List.
Back in the dark ages, in the 1980s, my brother was a huge music fan. He had a few thousand forty-five RPM records, most of them bought new. It was a bit of fun to kill an afternoon by listening to a stack of 45s. Even with an add-on for automatic play, listening to more than ten or fifteen songs was never an easy task. But we were young and didn’t mind, what else was there to do?
Then came the CD, and then the MP3 and now it was as easy to listen to ten thousand songs as it was to listen to ten. So then we ended up with things like The Beatles Anthology 1,2 ,and 3-where hours and hours of stuff that most people didn’t really want to listen to before became number one hits. Of course, I love The Beatles, so I was one of the ones that got these little box sets of unreleased songs.
Now you can get Box Sets of bands you never heard of, musical eras you didn’t know you missed, and music from parts of the world you didn’t know made music. And not just a few songs, but every song ever recorded. Hence the Box Set.
The Top Five Box Sets on the USA Today List are odd little items to my way of thinking. The Brit Box: U.K. Indie, Shoegaze, and Brit-Pop Gems of the Last Millennium tops the list and features 78 bands and comes in cool box that looks like a British Phone Box. I like most things British and I have never heard of most of these bands. So I might have to give a listen to some of it.
The War, A Ken Burns Film: Deluxe Edition features a lot of old songs both pop and classical from the PBS Television Series The War. I only got to watch a couple of episodes myself, but it looked very good, just like all of Ken Burns stuff looks.
The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 7: 1967 and Vol. 8: 1968, my sister was the big music fan in the 1960s and I heard a lot of these songs while I growing up. Yeah Motown is great stuff.
Miles Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions, I have never been a huge Miles Davis fan, but then, I have never really listened to him either. I have tried listening to Jazz, but with the exception of Peanuts Cartoons I have not found it much to my liking.
Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970, hippies and the sound of revolution in the air. Well, maybe it was a little too mellow for a revolution, after all the Grateful Dead came out of 1960s San Fransisco, didn’t they? Again, a box set full of songs I never heard of. Of course, I was just a kid in the 60s so I missed out on the really cool stuff.
Of course there’s nothing really new about box sets, there are a million of them floating around. But it is still fun to give the new ones a listen once in a while and hear what you’ve been missing.
