They're like recipe books: you have to buy the whole CD when all you really want is just a couple of favourites. Why shell out 15 quid for something you only half want? Why not just cherry-pick your favourites and put them on one handy CD? You can, if you must, invest a few hundred quid, borrow everyone else's CDs and make up your own compilation with a fancy CD burner.
Or you can make life easier for yourself by getting one of the new CD compilation companies (the Internet is full of them) to compile any tracks you want on one CD, often for less than the price of a disc in the shops. Better yet, you can get a custom CD made up and present it as a specially meaningful gift to a friend, a lover, or someone you hate, but haven't been able to confront in words.
What kind of messages can you convey? Simple expressions of love are easy in just about any genre: from You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To (Sinatra - why not?) to Schumann's Dichterliebe, to Thomas Greaves's Come Away Sweet Love, to Pulp's F.E.E.L.I.N.G C.A.L.L.E.D L.O.V.E, you've got it made; the CD compiles itself.
If you want to hint optimistically at foreign travel, you could pick anyone doing April In Paris, a bit of Respighi's Pines Of Rome, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody (if you're taking the car), Sheryl Crow's Leaving Las Vegas; with Stars Fell On Alabama or Ferry Cross The Mersey for the determinedly out-of-the-way.
The choice of genres narrows, on the other hand, if you're trying to put someone off. For this, you really need the contemporary pop song, with its fathomless litany of downer compositions. Want to attest to depression? Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now is the Smiths' classic opening track; Been Down So Long from the Doors amplifies the theme; Where Do I Begin by the Chemical Brothers articulates your helplessness in the face of the problem; Season Of Hollow Soul from kd lang's Ingenue (let's face it, the whole album would do) drags it out a bit more; while Love's Alone Again wraps it up with a sugary coating of trippy alienation.
But what about something more aggressive? Something to suggest either that you're nuts, or that the person you've sent the CD to might have lost the plot? With typical Brian Wilson literalism, I Just Wasn't Made For These Times (from Pet Sounds) lays the issue on the table, while Garbage's I Think I'm Paranoid fills in some detail (note: not to be confused with Willie Nelson's ineffably tender and lovelorn Crazy). Captain Beefheart's Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man is an option here, if that's a nuance you particularly want to include; otherwise you might just cut to the chase and announce that, as Robert Johnson put it, There's A Hellhound On My Trail, and, borrowing from the late Kurt Kobain, you (or I) had better Stay Away.
Jazz, on the other hand, is good on food. Why? Apart from the Happy Mondays' Tart Tart (and let's leave stuff like Erik Satie's Trois Morceaux En Forme De Poire out of it) you really have to get into your 1940s and 1950s jazz collections if you want to suggest to someone that either you'd like to eat with them more often or you think it's time they went on a diet. Charles Mingus's Jelly Roll may not really be about jelly, but you could try it. You might also suggest Salt Peanuts from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, with a Tangerine from Coleman Hawkins; or you could get Fats Waller to announce that You're Not The Only Oyster In The Stew; and in desperation you could have Slim Gaillard croon about Chicken Rhythm. It's a big marketplace.
The problem with classical music, in comparison, is that so much of it is nameless. Unless it has a particular extra-musical resonance shared between the listeners - something like Brahms's Clarinet Sonata Op 120 is almost certainly going to have an ambiguous meaning (appassionato? grazioso? which?). Yes, you can get round it by picking opera excerpts (Don Giovanni, The Knot Garden, etc) or some of the better-known named pieces (Delius's Brigg Fair if you want to leave the home counties; Debussy's Le Vent Dans La Plaine if you're hinting at a trip to, say, Kansas), but otherwise, the music has to do all the talking. But can you trust it? If you want to indicate wrenching despair, can you reliably go to one of Shostakovitch's string quartets? And is it a done deal for vibrant affection if you chose a Schubert lied sung by Jessye Norman? Or maybe that's the best thing about classical music: freed from the agenda of furtive message-sending, a classical compilation CD is only ever going to be pure music - the best kind.
Here's how:
A CD for the ex-boyfriend:
1 Gil Scott-Heron Legend In His Own Mind
2 The Police Don't Stand So Close To Me
3 Joni Mitchell You're So Vain
4 The Clash Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
5 The Beatles With A Little Help From My Friends
6 John Lennon Checking Out
7 Spice Girls Goodbye
8 George Michael Freedom
A CD for the dentist:
1 The Smiths Bigmouth Strikes Again
2 Take That It Only Takes A Minute
3 The Pretenders Don't Get Me Wrong
4 Jimi Hendrix Purple Haze
5 Pink Floyd Comfortably Numb
6 Lenny Kravitz It Ain't Over Till It's Over
7 Abba Money, Money, Money
8 Van Morrison Got To Go Back
Compilation Direct: A catalogue of over 2,000 hours of classical music is available by post or can be ordered over the Internet. Compilation Direct has a licence to use recordings by the Royal Philharmonic in Britain and you can mix a CD from any of them. An inlay card is printed, with personalised track listing and composers' names - you can also include a personalised message. Delivery within seven days.
Website: www.make-a-cd.com
£12.99 (+£1.50 p&p in UK)
Phone 00441 993770633, 993779002
Cerberus has an agreement with the independent record industry to provide a legal music site on the Internet, and run DIY CD services in the Cyberia Cafe and the shop Urban Outfitters - again in Britain.
The company is working on a new juke box which it hopes will be available in the summer. A fully automated, coin-operated system which allows you to put your money in, pick the songs you want and produce a CD, it will look like a cross between "an information kiosk and a computer game".
At Cyberia Cafe at 39 Whitfield Street, London W1 (0044171 681 4200), simply choose up to 70 minutes' worth of music from jazz, ambient, rock/indie and funk. When you are sure of your selection, contact a member of staff, who will put a blank CD into the machine and type in a code. The software prints out a CD sleeve listing the tracks and then "burns" them on to a CD. It costs £10 sterling. The Cyberia Cafe in Georges Street, Dublin, and the Global Cafe in O'Connell Street are both considering the possibility - and legality - of providing such a service here.
The Cerberus Service in Urban Outfitters is run by a company called "Carbon" and consists of a computer screen, mouse and headphones. You can search an archive of over 2,000 tracks by title or genre: dance, hip hop, ambient, jazz, New Age, world. Pick 72 minutes of music (usually, about 10 tracks). It costs £15. Website: www.cdj.co.uk