I had so much fun last week doing my list of 50 Great Songs Over 7 Minutes Long That Didn’t Make Rolling Stone’s List that I figured I would do a sequel.

Caveats: for better and worse, this list wasn’t created by a group of people sitting in a room, but rather just one guy using his iTunes. It’s probably too short on hardcore and too long on funny songs. However, when putting it together, it struck me that wittiness is a factor in a great short song in the same way that groove is a factor in a great long song.

This time, I narrowed it down to a single song per artist. Some of these are even the best song that artist ever did! And like last time, it’s alphabetical by artist.

50 Great Songs Under 2 Minutes Long

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Yesterday, Rolling Stone online put together a list of what they called “The Fifty Best Songs Over Seven Minutes Long.” Not so much. Sure, there were some all-time great songs on that list, but other songs weren’t even the best long song by the particular artist, much less on a 50 best ever list.

So, I figured that I’d do my own. Thanks to the magic of an iTunes playlist sort, it didn’t take very long to put together. Here are my rules: because some artists (Neil Young, Velvet Underground) work better with long songs, I figured that it was OK to have multiple songs by individual artists. I did, however, discount anything that had never been commercially released, which wiped out a lot of Bruce Springsteen songs.

Like Rolling Stone’s list, this is alphabetical by artist.

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I’ve just finished a big project: I recently bought a 1TB network-attached hard drive and put nearly every single song I own on it. I even finally finished ripping all of my CDs.

I set the hard drive up so that it automatically backs itself up, and so it’s the third thing I grab in case of a fire: Rox, my laptop, and that hard drive. Of course, maybe Rox can grab both laptops while I get the hard drive, but I’m guessing she might have other priorities.

In any event, the current count is approximately 68,000 songs on 4700 albums by 950 artists. This crazy-ass number reflects 30 years of being, well, a big dumb rock ‘n’ roll guy. It’s what I do, it’s who I am.

And between eMusic, iTunes, Amazon, Amoeba and the life-long friends whom I’ve been trading music for two decades, I have a pretty steady pipeline of new stuff that I’m looking forward to, older stuff that is reissued, new stuff that is suddenly huge super buzz, and older stuff that I missed in the past.

It. Just. Keeps. Coming. World without end, amen.

Stop yer complaining, you’re saying: this is not the worst problem for a music geek to have. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the best problem for a music geek to have. So shut up and stop whinging, already!

No doubt, my 15-year-old self who rode his bike to Tower Records to buy Who’s next, my 25-year-old self who was resigning himself to getting the CD version of Who’s next and my 35-year-old self who was downloading Who’s next outtakes from dodgy websites are all looking at me agog.

But it’s still a problem. And the problem is me.

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I’d like to wish a happy 25th Birthday to KFSR, 90.7 FM, the radio station at California State University, Fresno.

I know that if you check their website, it claims that they went on the air in the evening of October 31, 1982, but that’s dead wrong.

I can totally see how the mistake happened: in the early days, it always made total sense to combine the anniversaries with Halloween parties, and over the years, it just became accepted that the station was born on Halloween.

But it wasn’t: KFSR went on the air at noon on Saturday, October 30, 1982. I should know, I was there, having been looking forward to it since I got involved with the station in early 1981. And a quarter-century later, here’s what I remember for sure:

• It had been raining really hard.
• The first song played was Ramones “We Want The Airwaves.”
• Nothing was ever the same.

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With all of the talk about the death of the music industry, I thought it might be interesting to post another installment of “Medialoper Classic,” our series where we resurrect some of our older writings that might provide perspective on subjects we are currently discussing. This one is about how I made the decision to switch from vinyl to CDs.

It was originally published in CSUF’s Daily Collegian on February 3, 1989

I guess that it all started last summer when I spent almost a month trying to get The Primitives on album. I wandered in Tower Records, a place that I have literally haunted for over ten years, and was shocked and dismayed to discover that they only had it on Compact Disc. As a matter of fact they only had everything on Compact Disc. There was barely a record to be found. And suddenly I woke up. I realize that I’ve spent the last couple (OK, several) years in a drunken haze, and that even sober I not exactly cognizant with the real world, but it has just recently struck me hard in the fact that my most favorite vehicle of recorded music — the 12-inch 33 RPM polyvinylchloride long-playing phonograph record — is fast becoming as obselete as the 8-Track tape, bell-bottom jeans, or the Democratic Party. But why, dammit? Why are records dying??

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One of the problems with digital media is that it is inherently more ephemeral than physical media. It takes a fair amount of abuse to damage a CD beyond repair, but any number of common mishaps can lead to the complete destruction of a large music collection.

Add digital photos and videos to the mix and you’ve got the potential for a real disaster. The sort of disaster that used to require a major fire can now occur with a single hard disk crash.

For the average consumer, performing regular backups of digital media is a major hassle. Digital media collections require increasingly more space and backups require time and effort. Furthermore, traditional backups aren’t all that secure. What happens if a fire really does occur? Unless you’re paranoid enough to store your backups in a safe deposit box, chances are your backups will burn along with everything else you own.

Enough of the happy talk. Here’s a roundup of simple backup alternatives that can help you protect large digital media collections:

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I wanted to throw my 2 cents in on a point that Kassia made during her post on Monday:

Should it really be illegal to download an MP3 version of a song (or album) you’ve already legally purchased? Doesn’t legal precedent offer consumers a right to make a copy for personal use? Why is that we have turned the rights of consumers upside-down just because the music industry played its collective fiddles while the labels were burning?

So it started me wondering. Maybe it should be illegal to download an .mp3 version of a song that I already own if — and only if — it becomes illegal for the music industry to sell me another version of the exact same song that they’ve previously sold me.

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So, let me preface this entire thing by saying two things: 1) I l-u-v love Wilco, and I have since the first album, and expect to for the rest of my life and 2) Given that their music seems not to fit the narrow parameters of any current radio format, I have no issues with Jeff Tweedy getting as much of his amazing music out there in any way, shape or form possible.

That said, is it just me, or are TV shows currently flooded with Wilco music? And I’m not even talking about the Volkswagen commercials — which I’m fine with but fast-forward through — but in the actual shows themselves.

I’ve noticed it three times in the last week. One time is a novelty; two times is a coincidence; but three times is a trend! Therefore, I’ve decided to start The Wilco Songs on TV Shows Watch, which will be dedicated to cataloging the instances Wilco music shows up in a TV show.

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A few months back, wondering if we had missed something when Rox & I decided not to watch Friday Night Lights because we were suffering from new show serial overload. It was a rough week: we also gave up on Heroes pretty early, but were saved over last Xmas by a friend with a good bittorrent site and a DVD burner.

In any event, I wrote a post that said that if NBC would release the DVD of Friday Night Lights in time to reasonably consume it prior to the new season starting, I would purchase it. Well, NBC did, and so I did.

After watching the entire first season DVD and falling in love with the combination of heart-stopping comebacks and heart-wrenching drama, Rox and I are eagerly looking forward to watching the next season, which starts this Friday. And NBC is rewarded for the short window between the season and the DVD.

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Sometimes it’s really difficult to choose a topic for “That’s What I Like.” But not this time.

Yesterday, Rox & I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary, and there isn’t a thing on the gods’ green earth that I love more than her.

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