Exploring the Back Catalogue: Step Into The Light & General Reflections

Going largely backwards through a decades-long back catalogue after falling in love with a latter-day album is the reverse of how it generally works with music, but run-of-the-mill with literature. It’s like starting Dickens with Great Expectations, or Shakespeare with Hamlet, and then backtracking to their earlier work. In literature, nobody expects you to fetishise the first couple of efforts by an author and then bemoan the rest of their work, but that’s standard procedure for some music aficionados, in the context of contemporary music. Why is that?