“Ninety percent of everything is crud” – Theodore Sturgeon

When I first started paying attention to music, I found that albums were pretty much either all good or all bad. Admittedly, I had a pretty skimpy sample set:

• “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield
• “Ummagumma” by Pink Floyd
• “Nursery Cryme”, “Foxtrot”, and “Selling England by the Pound” by Genesis
• “Brain Salad Surgery” by Emerson, Lake and Palmer
• “Aqualung”, “A Passion Play”, and “This as a Brick” by Jethro Tull

From this sample of 9 albums, I concluded that all good albums had only good tunes on them. I was aware that there were bad songs but they were only bad albums so I didn’t have to worry about them.

As some of you may have guessed, this left me with some pretty unreasonable expectations about albums. As I explored other music, I began to discover that there were albums with some good music and some bad music. There were even albums with only 1 good song.

Of course, I wouldn’t buy them. That would just encourage bands to produce lesser works. Not to mention that spending $15 for 2 decent songs and 8 crappy ones made my skin crawl.

I guess that I have to thank Steve Jobs for getting me past that. I recently discovered Supertramp’s “Crisis? What Crisis?” album. I loved “A Soapbox Opera” but the other 9 tunes were awful. No dilemma. I bought the 1 song and forgot about the rest.

Sturgeon’s law applies as much as it ever did. I just don’t have to by the cruddy 90%. The only quibble that I have with the law is that 90% is far too generous for the music industry.