Trying an experiment

[omorka]

Generally speaking, I don't much see the point of listening to the radio for anything other than specific programming. Why let someone else whose taste you don't trust pick music for you?

But the Spouse's post about the Scruffy-the-Cat-seeded Pandora station made me curious, so I went and poked around.

I started one seeded with the Gin Blossoms to see what would happen.

Well, it certainly has picked my era - it handed me the Wallflowers' "One Headlight," the Counting Crows "A Long December," and then Matchbox Twenty's "Push."

Problem is, I'd like Matchbox Twenty if I could stand their lyrics, and there's no good way of telling the station "Yes, this is the right sound, but don't play misogynisitc assholes, please." Especially since there are a couple of Gin Blossoms songs that I didn't rip that aren't exactly woman-friendly. I just went ahead and voted the song down. Hey, at least the station apologized.

Now it's playing a Collective Soul song, "The World I Know," which isn't in the jangly guitars genre and which I had completely forgotten about, but which is, again, in the right time period.

Apparently my preferred genre is 1995-1998. :-/

Am debating adding Alanis Morissette and Pearl Jam to see what happens.

Comments

[fiona-conn.livejournal.com]

For me, listening to the radio has actually proven enlightening. At least, when I listen to the right station.

I'm currently enjoying an American station, WCLX, that I tune into via the internet. They play a lot of blues music and oldies from the 60s, 70s and 80s. They've sort of helped me out a bit with figuring what music and artists I like and don't like (Led Zeppelin's cool, but keep the Strawbs away from me at all costs -.-).

(Mind, something else I like about the station is that it's small, owned by a married couple, and they plug their local services, which is lovely to hear -- in fact, in some cases, the ads are read by folks who *work* at the places being advertised. The station owners, Diane and Russell, also do little blurbs about things in between now and then, though Diane tends to do it more often. She's fun to listen to. xD)

So, yeah. Radio doesn't have to be bad. Just depends what station you tune into. : )

[northwall.livejournal.com]

it's not misgynist to hate the woman who hurt you.

[bibulb.livejournal.com]

The trick is for the songwriter to not fall into the trap of painting the other person as a stereotype of the gender - they gotta make you hate them as an individual, not as a generic female (or male).

Costello and Jackson, for example, could swing both ways on that - sometimes, they wrote the other party as the scheming virago, and others as the person that they couldn't deal with. (Sometimes, plain and pure misANTHROPY comes up, but separate from gender roles. Yay venom.)

[bibulb.livejournal.com]

Huh. I started writing a response, but it turns out to be based on incorrect principles. Turns out that the Music Genome Project (which Pandora uses as data for its engine) DOES analyze lyrical content, but Pandora doesn't allow for anything finer than a "Yes/No/Abstain" vote mechanism. That's a lovely bit of design fail on their part, IMHO. If I have specific details in my design, LET ME SPECIFY THEM.
(Addendum : Likewise, let me give weighting - on the "Soundtracks for b-movies that don't exist" station I made, Stan Ridgway's "The Big Heat" came on, and I have no way to say "YESYESYESHELLYESEXACTLYWHATIWANT" over the basic "thumbs-up" that something like Devo's "Beautiful World" got...)

Experiment to try later to see how it handles lyrical composition : make a new station with Stan Ridgway and Harry Chapin as seeds and be RUTHLESS in selecting for narrative songs. But I suspect that this would be more effort than I really feel like putting in on a project like this.


(Secondary fail : their choice of picture for the record cover on Devo's "Beautiful World" is the Virgin two-fer CD cover, which Devo has previously expressed their displeasure with (http://web.archive.org/web/20040827060047/www.clubdevo.com/mp_redesign/tellus.html). But I realize that's just an aesthetic fail rather than integral conceptual fail.)