... there's no mediator. just me, my Taste Patterns and the StructureOfMusic itself. sure, i get music i don't like too, all the time. in every Pandora radio i made there has been (quite early) some attempts of the machine to break into the mainstream. you have to say: yes, i like bo diddley's rudimentary radical beat. no, John Cougar Mellencamp is inacceptable, and U2, even if you use the Diddley Beat. but this is not Pandora's fault, as some users seem to think. it is mine. i mixed some "Howlin Wolf" in it to get it straight. problem was, this was translated as "Howlin Wolf = Slow Blues", while the aspect that fascinates me is the merciless R'n'B beat he is producing quite often. so, no Muddy Waters. then it suddenly gave me New Wave songs, brilliant ones too, that must have crept in from other choces i made in other stations. while i love Orange Juice and Joy Division, that has just not been the idea of the Bo Diddley radio. difficult: how to give music thumbs down that is ok or even great but does not fit in. Pandora's fascination lies in shaping, crafting and fine tuning a certain section of musical taste (or Musical Truth, as i would always have argued). so it is a constant challenge. just not really listening for some songs, just letting it go, will spoil the work of an hour in minutes ...
this would not work for me in "social" environment. (i always would think "HOW in the world can you appreciate this genius and at the same time THAT pointless crap ...")
one thing that disturbs me is that my favorites list inevitably tends to look like a oldies-but-goldies page: Bo Diddley Radio started triumphantly with Velvet Underground, by the way. then it played Strokes to me, but very little new music that i did like. mostly too "fat" sounds (i even don't like Nirvana very much, though i sympathize and Kurt Cobain is said to have known and loved every apocryphical genius band of the early 80Ts). and mostly i don't like many of the new voices: either the average young white wimp voice that nearly all of the newer jangly-guitar-bands seem to have agreed upon (though of course that could be brilliant, lie in the first Cure album), or the complementary "bad boy" voice.
(see also John Lydon's wise words on the loss of Voices in modern pop music ... just like what old men alway say ...)
Posted by martin at February 17, 2006 8:45 PM | TrackBack