The lists that sad 4chan boards make for essential books or albums are useless self-indulgent displays. You don’t learn to appreciate anything with an incoherent list. Instead listen to every Phil Spector single obsessively and repeat that with every other artist one at a time

You have to understand things developmentally by building out context. To understand an artist you have to recreate him within. Read what books he liked. Read what his contemporaries wrote. Read everything he ever wrote. Only then will you know why something was a masterpiece

This is why all the great book lists are useless. They’ll just slap Faust in there but include no other work of German literature from 1760-1848. If Faust is a summation of an epoch of German culture, how can you understand it if you dont read anything else from that culture?

Likewise how can you appreciate the Beach Boys without understanding Phil Spector? Or Motown? Without reconstructing the developmental history of music production which Brian Wilson was great in context of and in relation to? You can’t. It’ll lead to superficial appreciation only

Everything is great in its own way, masterpieces dont exist in a vacuum. Studying and discovering is an endless process eternally enriching itself. Taste is about refinement. Good taste isnt formed in reference to prevailing fashion, but comes from objective aesthetic evaluation

I've spent years scouring for every insignificant forgotten piece of music, exotica, private pressing christian heavy-psych, library music. There's so much bizarre stuff out there you'll never hear if you're focused on listening to the "best" albums, which is a nonsense category

I don't think most people are ever going to become experts suddenly or develop the discipline or passion necessary to go so deeply into things. I dont think they need to, or that it's a failing not to. Whatever. But for those who want to learn the right way, this is how you do it