Useless Sound Useless Sound Remember when you were ...

Remember when you were a kid, and you thought how cool it would be to own all the albums you ever wanted and spend all your time listening to them? Some people think that's how rock critics live. While it's true that free music comes in the mail, it's always followed by nagging phone calls from strangers who want you to be excited about the music.

And the music, as adults grow to understand, is overwhelmingly lousy?primarily because most rock critics give in to those phone calls from strangers, hype more crap and create more lousy bands that hire more publicists to send more bad music.

I decided to free myself from this cycle last April, after realizing that I couldn't honestly say 2002 was a lousy year in music. I'd gotten in the rock-critic habit of only listening to whatever came in the mail. I decided that the remedy was to start buying music, and lots of it.

This decision coincided with the closing of the uptown HMV music store on Lexington Ave. I wouldn't have even known if I hadn't been running an errand on E. 86th; the store wasn't part of my usual shopping rounds. I was maybe hoping to find a decent remainders section. Instead, I discovered the store was closing out all kinds of great stock at incredibly cheap prices. Even better, a friendly employee informed me that the remaining stock would be dumped for even less in Manhattan's other HMV stores.

A few weeks and $2000 later, I had six large boxes of sealed CDs piled up in my office.

This was freedom. This was my summer. I was going to just hang out and listen to music all day long. Wonderful, glorious music for which I had paid perfectly good money. And most were imports from the past four years, so it was music that wouldn't have ever turned up in my mailbox. Put another nickel in that old nickelodeon, because my summer was going to be a wonderfully adolescent basking in all kinds of pop music, rock music, soul music and hipster indie music.

As I soon found out, those pro-Saddam leftists may have a point about freedom being overrated.

Anyone who's tried to give Oasis a try knows that Britpop sucks. But can you imagine suffering through my-God-I-think-literally hundreds of lame Oasis knock-offs? Dodgy. Elbow. Candidate. Midget. Smaller. They sucked. They all sucked. Embrace managed one good song, but I'd already heard it on their sole domestic release?and let's thank the DGC label for drawing the line at just one of those.

And the UK hasn't been breaking any new ground in soul, trance, goth, industrial and pop music?no matter what those lying douche bags have been scribbling in the pages of Q and Melody Maker.

I wasn't just hating on new artists, either. I also rediscovered that certain respected bands were as useless as I remembered. Why not give the complete works of the Monochrome Set one more plodding spin? Hey, maybe those albums by the Walker Brothers finally sound less pathetic than Andy Williams! And let's not forget Secret Affair and the Time UK and the other miserable bands that made up the 80s mod revival! That's right! Their albums have all been reissued with bonus tracks?it's all bonus suckiness.

They blow, they blow, they blow. And they always did. As the days got hotter, my purchases transformed from a tower of potential to a scrap heap of history. Christ, not even history. More like a scrap heap of hyperbole from a music press that makes the Alfie sound inventive by comparison.

And yet I still had a great time, because I was free from the burden of trying to make clever comments about all this trash. Did I mention that all of the bands sucked? That's as deep as I ever needed to get. You want insight? Pay me. Even better, nobody was calling on the phone to ask when I'd join in praising the Cosmic Rough Riders or Sing Sing or any other act on the calculatedly fey Poptones label. I was simply another music consumer?meaning, of course, that I was getting ripped off at a rapid pace.

Meanwhile, the hits of summer 2002 continued to play themselves out. Kylie made her comeback, Mary J. Blige wanted no drama, Sheryl Crow soaked up the sun, Nickelback broke through, Jimmy cracked corn, I didn't care.

I was also pleased with the forgotten charm of buying tons of CDs. I didn't learn anything from my shopping spree that couldn't have been gained from online downloads, but there's still something lacking about that sense of disappointment. There's no real sense of loss unless you lay out some cash, take the music home and put it in the player. Even at a discount, you should earn the right to say, "Holy Christ, this really sucks."

The summer ended up being really miserable. Things happened that made the existence of Nicole Russo seem like only a minor disaster. Life seemed increasingly meaningless, and the last few boxes weren't much fun to work through. In the end, I added just two albums to the permanent collection. All hail the velvet goldminers known as David Devant and His Spirit Wife. Also, kudos to Boy George, whose acoustic revisiting of his solo years was simply inspired.

I also want to say, in best Cooper-to-Crabtree fashion, that I've learned my lesson. Well, I want to say that, but the truth is I'm still an obsessive-compulsive pop geek who remains convinced that the best music is still being hidden from me. And, as you may have noticed, that HMV in Times Square went out of business back in January?