UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY SOMEWHERE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN — Plane crash survivor and avid music fan Chris Ackerman was pleasantly surprised to see his top five albums nestled in the remote palm tree grove where his Australia-bound Boeing 767 had exploded into flames, blood-spurting fellow passengers report.
“Oh sweet, they’re all here!” Ackerman confirmed, hopping across the sand on his severely wounded leg to flip through the top albums he had mentally picked out years ago. “I always went back and forth on ‘Nevermind’ vs. ‘In Utero.’ I felt a little weird about the 20th anniversary deluxe edition. But all those demos and bonus tracks are going to be clutch here because my phone got incinerated, so I don’t have Spotify or anything. Or food. Or a tourniquet. Or a record player, now that I think about it. Guess I’m just supposed to just look at these album covers and imagine what they sound like.”
Non-audiophile survivors on the island were confused by Ackerman’s ill-timed music discussion.
“We’re thousands of miles from civilization, we need water and medical care, and frankly we’re all going to die soon,” said fellow passenger Kara Montevarchi. “But this guy won’t shut up about how The Clash’s self-titled debut is superior to ‘London Calling’ and how amazing that the years he spent deciding on his ‘five desert island albums’ finally paid off. Did he get brain damage when the plane lost oxygen or something? Or is he just one of those insufferable music weirdos who will eventually die of dehydration one way or another? I need to go lie down.”
Music anthropologist Warren De Witt explained that “five desert island albums” may oftentimes appear mysteriously when island-bound disaster strikes.
“It’s true. We’ve seen it happen a few times now,” De Witt said. “You wind up on a desert island for whatever reason, and as long as you still have a heartbeat and ears and you picked out those five albums at some point, you’ll see them all there. Usually they’ll be in the preferred audio format, too. That’s why it’s so important to keep your top five mentally updated. We found a case where someone hadn’t thought about her desert island discs since middle school, and she wound up stuck with Smash Mouth and a few ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ CDs 15 years later after a sailing accident. Tragic. And then she died, too.”
At press time, Ackerman had passed out from excitement and critical blood loss, prompting others to attempt to revive him by smacking him with a stack of liner notes.