I’ve spent the first few days of the week looking at the numbers. Now I want to look at the names.
My musical genome groupings have made for some interesting bedfellows. Take ‘Melancholy Pop,’ where Michael Penn, Fountains of Wayne, The Shins and The Smiths all make their home. I don’t know if those four artists would normally be grouped together, but they make for a plausible pod.
The next step of my musical genome analysis is to see how each of my categories applies to my favorite artists when those artists are ranked in order of preference.
In other words… I like a lot of pop songwriters, but are those songwriters mostly in the bottom half of my list of artists? Is there any statistical significance to the distribution of categories across my personal preferences?
Yesterday I looked at how many genome categories applied to each of my favorite artists. Today I’ll approach from the other side and how many artists earned each genome label.
If you slogged through all 35 of my posts leading up to this week, you’ve probably guessed that the most prevalent category is ‘Melancholy.’ And that makes sense, given that it’s a quality that can apply to many different styles of music, as opposed to a style of music itself.
This week I will present the findings of my 35-day genome project, hoping to unearth some pearls of wisdom from the data I’ve so diligently accumulated.
Rather than post songs by the same artists I’ve been discussing over the past seven weeks, I’m going to present each day’s findings alongside a YouTube video of a cute girl covering a Bob Dylan song.
I’m interrupting this weekend’s random selection for a last-minute movie review/song appreciation.
I just got in from seeing The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a lovely adaptation of Stephen Chbosky’s 1999 novel (Chbosky wrote the screenplay and directed the film himself). The movie contains several references to the song ‘Asleep’ by The Smiths — the closing track of their 1987 singles compilation Louder Than Bombs.
Meet Me In Montauk 