My apologies to all the “niggaz and bitches” in my readership who might be offended by today’s Song of the Day. The Random iTunes Fairy can be politically incorrect.
This song is a nice example of why I don’t listen to a lot of rap. While I really enjoy the 90s G-funk sound that Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre made popular, I tire quickly of songs about drug use, gangs and women as sex objects.
So I know what I like, and I hope the past couple of months have revealed some patterns that suggest why I like what I like.
That raises two more questions: 1) Why don’t I like other artists who are similar to the artists I like?; and 2) Who else might I like if give them a chance?
I spent awhile cross-referencing music websites, Googling different genres, following genealogical patterns on AllMusic.com, trying to come up with a list of artists who fall into the same genome combinations I’ve described this week.
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.
