| 714 songs! By an artist of whom I’d be willing to bet nobody reading this has ever heard! This is just way, way cool. If I were the kind of person who liked to invest strange collector mechanisms with great weight, then I think I’d do so here: one can, using the frogpond directive, follow imaginary paths that one’s taste might have taken other than the ones it actually did. (It doesn’t take much of a leap to then imagine oneself living an entirely different life than the one that actually came to pass.) Whole possible worlds lie waiting in the deceptively sterile “other listeners liked” field. But I don’t go for the grand pronouncement, apart from the occasional “[insert psycho metal band of recent vintage] are the saviors of rock music and must accordingly be worshipped by all,” and for me the fun of all this lies mainly in the distances one can leap in the space of a few seconds. Slick Rick, NWA, Too Short, UGK: this last leading to an entire list of artists of whom I’d never heard but who have, on the evidence, left quite a body of hip-hop behind them, much of it extremely obscene in nature. Baha Men, Milk Inc., LASGO, Sylver—maybe these last three are household names somewhere, I don’t know. (Chances are good that fans of the genre unfortunately saddled with the name “happy hardcore” are familiar with them, but for all intents and purposes they are hopelessly obscure.) What I do know is that you can come up with all sorts of blessedly unimportant transient moments by using this virtually thought-free process—all you have to do is come up with one artist’s name and the rest is simple point-and-click—and that it’s one more way of defeating the Clear Channel’s attempts to persuade the public that there are actually only three songs in the world, and that they are all by Shania Twain. |
