I'm not doing the Popless challenge in 2009, but I have stopped reading Pitchfork, and I've noticed two things - my reckless music purchases have slowed dramatically, and I find that I'm enjoying the music I do end up buying a hell of a lot more. For example, this AV Club feature on that most esoteric subgenre of music called "power-pop" came to my attention yesterday afternoon, and ultimately resulted in me downloading Shoes, "Black Vinyl Shoes" and Big Star's "#1 Record/Radio City"...
...which I'd never heard before.
Everyone talks about Big Star in these hushed, reverent tones (which is odd, considering how joyous their music can be), but my first exposure to them was "Third/Sister Lovers," which could very well be a great album but is pretty goddamned strange when you're expecting to hear something quite different. And as it turns out, what I was expecting to hear on "Third" is what I ended up hearing on "#1 Record", which is fucking fantastic. As if you didn't already know.
