Back in college, my friends and I had a constantly rotating set of CDs we had burned – compilations of our favorite hits, happy tunes, and general wish lists of pop. When I stuck the Women and Songs CD in, I honestly checked to make sure I hadn’t gotten it mixed up with one of my Sharpie-labeled “Great Girls” discs.

It’s a random mix of tunes – a lot of 90s, a lot of singer-songwriters, and of course, all by female artists. It was a good skipping CD – one where I keep one finger on the 'next' button of my remote, ready to re-live a 30-second clip of Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want To Wait” for its Dawson’s Creek purposes, but not prepared to listen to more.

If you want to delve into deeper levels, there are some definite flaws. There isn’t much rhyme or reason to the choice of artists, besides their shared anatomy. The ordering wasn’t even particularly well set up – Janet Jackson, Joss Stone, and Brandy all lumped together in the middle, and surrounded by a lot of the same Jewel-sounding boy-missing songs. And with the negative sentiment that was surrounding the first volume of Women and Songs for being almost entirely comprised of blond women with guitar, there is a little bit of tokenism going on in a selection of a slightly more diverse cadre of artists (although I note that none of them made the cover).

It also has the feeling that it’s not a collection of music that women really lean toward, but of music that men think that women like – Madonna for inspiration, The Cardigans to dance to, Natalie Merchant to mend a broken heart, and Enya to take a nice hot bath to. But it’s so limited — sure, as a woman, I have listened to these songs, and all of the people singing are women, but there is so much great music by women, for women, about women. The choices here are extraordinarily suspect.

As a side note, there could be the charity angle, since the liner notes also print a small ad for The Breast Cancer Site (a fabulous charity that turns your mouse clicks into funds for mammograms for uninsured and underinsured women nationwide – please take the three seconds out of your day) but there isn’t any real information about whether the profits from the CD actually go to them or not. So, that’s out.

With no ulterior motive to buy this, I can say that it was fun to listen to, but managed to bother me enough that all it’ll ever do is end up dispersed through my iTunes.  If any of this music appeals to you, you probably have all of it already. It seems more of a moment to discover the wonder of a playlist than shell out for a new CD of the same old songs.