So far things aren’t as bad as I’d feared they would be. I’m talking, of course, about the flood of millennium garbage.

Honestly, I thought the TV would be packed with news specials like “The Millennium in Review,” “The Millennium at a Glance,” or “1000 Years of Taking it From Whitey.” For the most part, that hasn’t been the case.

And, with the exception of that “Y2K” movie, there haven’t really been any made-for-TV movies either. So, once again let me qualify things by saying that things aren’t as bad as I had feared. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not some ridiculous crap out there.

For instance, Sony Music is putting out a 26 CD set called “Soundtrack for a Century.” The collection is an attempt to put all the important music of the century in one convenient place.

Convenience really is the name of the game with this collection. The CDs are arranged into convenient discs like “Rock,” “Jazz,” “Broadway,” etc. While I suppose there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with trying to collect the best music of the century, it seems like a ridiculously large task. One look at the track listing of any of the discs begs the question “Who would listen to this?”

For instance, the “Pop Music, the Modern Era” disc features Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” and Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit’ It.” Now, I plan on celebrating the “Willennium” just like everyone else, and Billy Joel is all right with me, but those are not two songs I want to hear sequentially.

On top of that, it seems to me most of this music is stuff most people would already have anyway. For instance, you may already have Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law,” but why in God’s name would you want them on one album, generically titled “Rock, The Train Kept a Rollin’?”

“International Music,” “Country,” “R&B;” this collection is like a train wreck of bad DMX. What’s even funnier are the absolutely glaring omissions on the collection.

Sony Music, after all, doesn’t own the rights to every musical recording. So, while you will get Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” you won’t get anything by The Beatles.

Obviously, this collection isn’t geared toward people who actually listen to music on a regular basis. Instead, it’s aimed at yuppies, wannabes and pretty much anyone else who completely missed the boat.

I’m sure many a lame white person will purchase “Jazz, the Definitive Performances,” and pontificate on the merits of Thelonious Monk based solely on the information they learned in the 308-page, full-color, hard-cover coffee table book.

The people at Sony Music aren’t the only ones doing their damnedest to catch everyone up. If you watch The Discovery Channel, you may have seen ads for the “Millennium” video set. Four, six or even eight videos aren’t going to get you up to speed on an entire millennium.

Unfortunately, we Americans are blessed with both a passion to learn and a desire to do so in the shortest time possible. We don’t actually need to know what we’re talking about, we just like to feel like we do.

But if you really want to be in the know about, well, anything, you need to have experienced it while it happened. We all like to feel like we were part of every important thing that has ever happened around us, but in reality, we weren’t.

I’d like to say I was a part of the early ’90s “Grunge” thing, but in reality I only got into Nirvana after I saw them on MTV, just like any other hayseed.

How many baby boomers strut around claiming to have been part of some ’60s hippie culture? Not that such a culture didn’t exist, but now that it’s become the predominant image from that period, every dillweed that owns “Steppenwolf’s Greatest Hits” acts like they were freakin’ Jim Morrison.

Nothin’ wrong with being lame, most of us are. At least have the dignity to admit it. Also, keep in mind that just because your experience wasn’t the one that became the collective representative experience for that era doesn’t mean it was lame.

A few things from any time period, a century, a millennium, are singled out as the significant ones.

Naturally, not everything is worth being held on to, but keep in mind what you might be missing.

Sony Music’s idea of what music defined the century may be skewed for a number of reasons.

Most importantly, buying “Soundtrack for a Century,” or any type of millennium in review won’t catch you up on what you missed.

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Ben Godar is a senior in sociology from Ames. He just wanted to write “Willennium” one more time.