(Please Enjoy): What Does "Favorite" Mean?

Beck's "Guero" turns twenty and so do I (sort of).

(Hell yes) I’m moving this way, I’m doing this thing (please enjoy)

- Beck, “Hell Yes”

Beck is not my favorite artist¹. Guero is not the first CD I ever bought². “Go It Alone” is not the first song I ever wrote fan-fiction about³. And yet, Beck’s Guero fills an extremely important role of influence in my development as a music fan, because it is, I think, the first album I bought by an artist I was had become a fan of all on my own.

Now, that’s a ridiculous notion. Nothing I discovered in 2004/2005 was ‘on my own.’ I had friends and friends’ older brothers recommending me artists and checking out CDs from the public library to burn me copies of. In the case of Beck, it was the omnipresence of “Girl”⁴ on the VH1 Top Twenty Music Video Countdown and middle of the night music video channels on the premium cable my friend Matt “Wagon” had that would drone on during late night at his house in the summer.

Apocryphal photograph from one such a night were the “Girl”music video might be playing during the cooking of a freezer pizza. 2006 maybe.

VH1 had long been a tastemaker for me. It was where I first heard the (underrated, overhated) “How You Remind Me” by Nickleback⁵, it was what put me on to “Beautiful Day” and one of the oldest MP3s in my iTunes library: “Days Go By” by Dirty Vegas, which is also an elite music video.

Does this newsletter feel name-droppy? It’s meant to. I don’t want you to think its all Jack White all the time in this house⁶. In fact, I have a whole crucial and necessary roster of artists and albums I love just as much as any of those artists my close friends, loved ones, and people I’ve talked to for more than six seconds know me to love.

Please Enjoy

You know I am incapable of simply enjoying things without turning them into little homework projects. I may leave clean clothes folded at the foot of my bed as they dance from my dresser, to the comforter, to the floor, and back around a few times before they get put away, but cognitively, and in my music library, there’s precision that would make the most intricate surgeon jealous of my skills. Typically, this takes the form of lists.

Are making lists fun? To me, yes. There’s an obvious subjectivity to any kind of list: rankings are almost always flawed. This is something a lot of music writing and music writing discourse loves to discuss. Rolling Stone did a list in 2024 of the top 500 songs of all time that has its own wikipedia page. People were mad. Examples: Harry Styles’ “As It Was” was #500. Are there 499 songs better than one of Harry Styles’ lesser singles? Sure. Are there an infinite songs better than it that deserve to be the “worst” song on the Rolling Stones top 500 songs of all time list? Definitely. Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” is four songs better but two songs worse than The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” Don’t tell Black Francis Kim Deal’s “Cannonball” (with The Breeders) cracks the 480s. One could go on.

High Fidelity gets this exercise exactly right, careful also to make fun of the guys (me) who take their lists a little too seriously. On the podcast feed I’ll drop my Top Five Side 1, Track 1s just for fun.

The thing about listmaking is that there are always omissions. Readers will never be uniformly pleased. It is a terribly indulgent exercise for a music writer, or a writer of any kind, of any media.

But it is also terribly fun. I love making lists. I love arbitrarily ranking things. Top Radiohead songs included on their Best Of ranked by best songs to wake up to on shuffle in my alarm clock CD player freshman year of college? Hell yes (to quote Beck). That’s a fun list to make, because it isn’t about Radiohead. It is about my freshman year of college.

Lists can help us make sense of the media we enjoy and articulate something otherwise intangible about how and why we enjoy it.

A Little List (and back to Beck)

If I were to tell you my top ten albums over half of them would be by the same three artists and everybody knows you can’t eat ice cream for dinner all the time (is that a common expression? I feel like I’ve heard that before). If for no reason other than the sake of an interesting conversation, I started keeping a little list of Favorite Albums by Non-Favorite Artists. Some rules:

1. you’ve seen a favorite artist 5+ times

2. you own every album by a favorite artist

3. you wear t-shirts and hoodies of a favorite artist

4. people who don’t know you closely know you like a favorite artist

5. favorite artists survive major life changes and mile stones (i.e. you can’t “grow out” of a favorite artist)

6. a favorite artist can rise into or fall out of favor (e.g. Cold War Kids, Radiohead, or Death Cab for Cutie)

7. a favorite artist can’t just be a artist/album you liked at a formative age (e.g. Nickelback’s Silver Side Up rips but is not a top ten just because I had it when I was 12)

These are non exhaustive rules and they are not mutually exclusive. For example, you can have never seen a favorite artist live or you can have a favorite artist but spend zero money on them (easier in the era of music streaming, though, if they’re your favorite, give them some money!). Non-favorite artists simply need to not match these rules and are eligible.

This seems mean. What is a favorite, definitionally, not following my own wild rubric. A quick google tells us a favorite is “preferred before all others of the same kind” and the example is "their favorite Italian restaurant" which will be useful information to have once I break out this list.

Another quick google reveals that there is over 12.7 million albums, so while it might seem cruel to say Death Cab for Cutie are no longer a favorite band, singling out Narrow Stairs or Trasatlanticism from that pile of 12.7 million albums feels generous enough, especially to a band I have seen 5+ times.

Okay, enough hedging. You want the list, here it comes.

Top Ten Favorite Albums by Non-Favorite Artists, unranked

1. Billy Joel’s The Stranger

2. U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind⁷

3. Pink Floyd’s The Wall

4. Beck’s Guero

5. Okkervil River’s The Stand In’s

6. The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

7. Girls’ Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

8. Touche Amore’s Lament

9. Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady

10. The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America

What does favorite mean? To me, it means comfort. Familiarity. And that’s what the best media does for us when we seek it out of the infinite library of stuff to read, watch, and listen to.

Let’s focus on Guero. A CD I for sure paid nearly $20 for at the Boardman Barnes & Nobel, probably in the fall of 2005 or winter of 2006 (we are still commemorating its 20th birthday here anyway) 100% on the strength of “Girl” and “Girl’s” excellent music video alone. “E-Pro,” a staple in dorm room Rock Band sessions with fellow English majors and cheap beer enthusiasts was a few years away from being a favorite on the album.

When I was a freshman in high school, not college, my favorite songs on Guero were “Que Onda Guero” and its cool, weird, vaguely southwestern sounds, “Missing” and its strange, dancey groove, “Hell Yes” and its bombastic rap mannerisms (hard to say what came first, Guero or The Gray Album), and the double-shot of “Farewell Ride” and “Go It Alone” which heavily inspired the hysterical western pastiche I wrote during the Jonathan Reynolds Summer Writing Camp at Denison College before sophomore year of high school. I will try my hardest to find that and read it over on the podcast feed; know it was hilarious, and that the protagonist was called “Tucson Joe.”

What was it about Guero that caught me at 14 so well?

I prayed heaven today would bring its hammer down on me and pound you out of my head I can’t think with you in it

The album has no shortage of the kinds of ear worm lyrics a young romantic might affix to his romantic tangles (read: none), but that wasn’t all of it. “E-Pro” is a pretty heavy guitar song, like The White Stripes who I was in the peak discovery phase up, but even more like The Raconteurs who was still a little young too appreciate, still, that slide into the “na-na na na na na na” refrain is sick to ears trained, untrained, mature, and immature. I just checked in with Ben: he gets it.

“Broken Drum” brings a theatrical melodrama to whatever imagined narrative the album is trying to present. Definitely fits into the sonic palate of my would-be Clint Eastwood character written in the pages of a composition notebook at writing camp.

The uncoolness of that last sentence is not lost on me, and I think, the uncoolness of Guero in a weird way is what makes it cool? Not quite eclectic enough to be mislabeled as “world music” but musically more adventurous than Beck’s imperial run in the 90s. Something I can only realize in hindsight is that Guero and I had a lot in common: uncool, expressive, wildly curious, melodramatic. “I’ll clap my hands along,” Beck sings in the deluxe edition track aptly named “Clap Hands,” “and rattle on like a vagabond.”

That was sort of my whole schtick: hop on the bicycle, strap the CD player to my waistband, and ride around clapping and rattling.

Guero and I are both twenty today?

Okay, I am not twenty. I am nearly thirty-five. Guero is for sure 20 though. Like many music fan lifers, I came into cultural consciousness during my freshman year of high school. Beck, Guero specifically and exclusively, was the first artist and album that I put myself on to (again, with the heavy hand of late night premium cable vjs and VH1) that I went out and bought myself with my own money gift cards for the bookstore my knowing family was so often to give me. I probably had a crush on the kind of girl who could blot out the sun with her dark sunglasses, like this nerdy guitar guy was singing about in the music video, I probably wanted to be a sauntering cowboy like I imagined based on my extremely limited understanding of the southwest and the sounds I understood to at least be sort of coming from those places.

I note, with great interest and absolutely no surprise, that all but three of my Top Ten Favorite Albums by Non-Favorite Artists are albums I first discovered in high school. The “Favorite Artists” list is, with one exception, made up of bands I discovered in high school.

There’s a line in “Go It Alone”:

Looking back and the sky is burning in my rear-view mirror

We do a lot of looking back. I do, anyway. Today I was on a familiar drive with Ben in the car thinking about what CDs I might give him and what years those gifts would make the most sense, as if there is a “wrong” or “right” way to listen to music. As if the things that give us the most joy require complicated rules or qualifiers?

There’s a short version of this newsletter: Beck’s Guero is very good and it came out twenty years ago today. I became a music fan when I tore the shrink wrap off that jewel case for my own moment of discovery. There’s a phrase that’s repeated in “Hell Yes,” the voice of a sort of robotic woman saying “please enjoy.” Favorite? Non-favorite? who cares? I’m clapping along still.

1. We’ve established this is a revolving door of The White Stripes, Jack White & his rolodex of other projects, Animal Collective (& their rolodex of other projects), and Coheed & Cambria. The Gaslight Anthem, sometimes.

2. Weird Al’s Running With Scissors and U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, same purchase, at the FYE in the Polaris Fashion Center in Columbus, Ohio, about six years before I would be living down the road at Otterbein College

3. That would be Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” specifically the acoustic live version from the 9/11 first responders benefit Concert for New York City, which was also my first exposure to Jay Z (by way of a spirited and radio-friendly “I.Z.Z.O.”

4. All-timer happy sounds/dark ass lyrics song.

5. Third or forth CD purchase, Silver Side Up, which my narc brother almost turned over to my parents for its explicit lyrical content. Great hard rock record, that’s a hill I’ll die on.

6. Did you know Jack White plays bass on the Guero album track “Go It Alone”?

7. This one might be contested after my Year of U2, they’ve become nearly a favorite.