“People were constantly asking for my advice: ‘Tell me what five albums I should buy now,’ or ‘Tell me what are the five best heavy metal albums of all time,”‘ Scaruffi said. “Eventually, you get tired of answering the same question, and you prepare a list. Then the list becomes many lists.”
He collected a good amount of his catalog of rankings and essays from the site in A History of Rock Music, 1951-2000, which was published in 2003 and has sold about 1,500 copies by his estimate. That same year, he also published Thinking About Thought: A Primer on the New Science of Mind, Towards a Unified Understanding of Mind, Life and Matter, which deals mainly with consciousness and artificial intelligence. His studies in those latter subjects have included terms as a visiting scholar at Stanford and Harvard and lecturing posts at, among other places, the University of California, Berkeley, where last year he taught The Nature of Mind (an introduction to cognitive science) and A History of Knowledge.
But visiting his site and reading his arguments against the Beatles' legacy (“Ray Davies of the Kinks was certainly a far better songwriter than Lennon & McCartney”) or his list of “Most significant works of music 1950-90” (equal parts Karlheinz Stockhausen and Cecil Taylor), readers could expect Scaruffi to be dedicated solely to developing a complete music compendium, a sort of musical Wikipedia without all the extra help. Not so, he said.
“Probably my biggest ambition would be to write a history of knowledge,” he said. “Something that packages all of my interests together: literature, science, philosophy, politics — whatever.” Music, he said, is just one part of a much larger puzzle.
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