2000 not out!

 What goes from Bad Bunny to Talking Heads?

I celebrated my 1000th post on 12 December 2022 and now, 687 days later, we get to 2000 - compared with 963 days for the first 1000, I'm accelerating rapidly!

Once again, the main focus has been music with another 757 posts (bringing us to a grand total of 1517 on music) which I reckon cover approximately 2250 albums and 60 singles. The main source of albums was the charts covering SIXTEEN different years randomly picked between '56 and '24 and it's fair to say the quality has been very variable. From a position of low expectation, '05 is probably the year I enjoyed the most - we met some really decent albums in that year (and Black Eyed Peas which I still shudder at the memory of). Conversely, I had high expectations for '90 which turned out to be very disappointing indeed - and I can also assure you that '77 was most definitely not the classic year for music that everyone would have you believe. Most of the other years were a mix of highs and lows - my main take-aways are that everyone listened to just Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley in the 50s and the album charts in the 70s-90s definitely skewed to an older audience than I remembered. I've also really enjoyed following the charts forward in time and have caught a load of albums I would otherwise have missed, especially since I expanded my remit to check out all the new entries in the chart every week.

The Guardian's best-of lists from 22-23 have also given me some interesting albums - and some utterly terrible ones as well. The singles have come from the "most streamed tracks of each year" list - it was interesting to start with but boy has it become a drag to my completer-finisher inner voice, which is very quiet for some things, but not when it comes to lists! Much more enjoyment has been found on the trips across R.E.M and Billy Bragg's output - I have enjoyed the growth of both artists across the years and it's been an absolute pleasure to revisit them. 

There were another 95 posts on movies (231 in total, with one film per post) with the sources being The Guardian's and Empire's best films from '22 and '23, Empire was included at the end of last year because some of The Guardian suggestions were absolutely terrible - and that theme has very much continued to be true for TV, with another 85 posts (134 in total) here representing quite the investment of time.

Despite all the time spent in front of the telly, I still seem to have made it out quite a bit in the past couple of years with another 28 posts on theatre (39 in total), 24 gigs (30), 7 musicals (10 - and I don't like musicals, but a lot of these have been very good) and 2 sports events (2). I also found time to post an obituary for Annie Nightingale (2) - and then finally there's this post to take us up to 2000!

The most popular post has, for no obvious reason, been this one - Noah's album is decent enough (and I'm still made to listen to frequently) but it's got over twice as many "views" as the next most popular one (which is Sir Clive Sinclair's obituary). I do realise that most of the impressions I get are bot related and it's always amusing when they go a bit mad - which they certainly did in September '22 when I had approximately 20 times my normal traffic for a month and then things all settled back down for no obvious reason.

As with the first 1000, my main enjoyment has come from the discovery and the writing, although this year I'm thinking that attempting both The Guardian and Empire's list is a challenge too far - some of The Guardian's options (particularly the films) are just really a bit too left-field for me (and some are not really all that good either). Another part of the problem is that there's actually been some pretty decent telly this year (which bodes well for next year's lists) and there's just only so much time available for all the music, films, telly. gigs and theatre out there. 

Finally, thank you to everyone who has read or commented on anything - hopefully some of it has introduced you to new stuff or reminded you (pleasantly or otherwise) of old stuff. And I apologise for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors - I know it will surprise you but I have to admit I'm not perfect (but I do try my best).