Probably the process I’ve just described doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, but this is because describing web-based activities doesn’t generally make for captivating prose. Fine, fine. Watch this. No game of “Six Degrees of Separation” ever produced the mind-expanding combinations of sound and vision you can get out of one minute’s time in the frog pond. Starting from some completely random place in the memory, I’ll run a search on “Sex Gang Children,” a strange band from the Batcave era of London post-post-punk whose mere existence now seems like it must surely have been a dream. Pow: 195 songs. Not all of them link to files I can get (there’s a probability ranking next to the song title: zero probability means “you can’t actually get it”), but for our purposes all we need is one, so let’s go with “Alamogordo All Over Again,” on the third page of our results. What did other people bored or ancient enough to actually be running searches on “Sex gang Children” also like? Well, they liked Bauhaus, of course, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Alien Sex Fiend, by which I am tempted; but in the four-hole there they are -- the Virgin Prunes -- didn’t their singer die recently? Click. |
