Today's song: Uptown Funk
I have noticed a pattern. When i choose a song i generally choose a song i like and know well. This means that most of the songs i choose are pretty old. My theory is that musical tastes get locked in in your teen years and after college your tastes are unlikely to change much. So to break out of this pattern i decided to randomly choose a song from the Billboard charts that i had never heard of, listen to it, and write about it.
When i looked at the list, a few things struck me. I did not know anything in the top ten except the two Taylor Swift songs. Another thing that struck me was how the hell is Megan Trainor on the charts? Kids today! Wouldn't know a good song if it bit them on their giant junk-food and soda swollen posteriors. They let a song about some white girl's fat ass break the top ten. Anyway I picked number 1 because although i knew who Bruno Mars was, i had never heard of Mark Ronson.
This isn't going to be a deep analysis of the song. If you want that kind of thing wait for Buckley to do a Musical Autopsy on this song. I am just going to give you a few of my impressions and my take away from this little experiment in randomly choosing a song.
First off, i kind of like Bruno Mars. I wouldn't want to be in foxhole with him if i had to go to war or have him by my side if we had to kill a bear with hand weapons, but i like him well enough for a musician that puts out music that is generally not to my tastes. He is a lively entertainer and he looks like he is having fun with this song. This song is a fun song. It is catchy and i can see why it did well with the masses. I am not going to begrudge them for putting this song at the top of the charts.
As the song progresses i keep waiting for Mark Ronson to start singing. And i keep waiting. Maybe he'll do the chorus or the second half of the song. Well, i got tired of waiting and went to the Wikipedia to look him up.Seems like this guy is more of a DJ than a singer. Ok, no problem with that. Just seems weird that's all.
After listening to this song, i just don't care. It's fine. It's catchy and i wouldn't leave some place that had it playing, but i wouldn't linger if it came on when i was on my way out. All in all it left me feeling pretty, meh.
That's the problem with new music. Let's say one thousand songs come out a year that have a shot of you liking them. After all if you are a die hard punker you are unlikely to really connect with the Dwight Yoakam catalog. You may not even hear every one of these one thousand hypothetical songs. Some of the ones you'll hear will be fine, you might even like them. But these new songs have to compete for mental space with every song you ever heard. Not all of them are going to make the cut and you may end up with some small handful that make it to you life time list of favorite songs. Math time: if you add five songs a year from the time you are, say, nine years old by the time you get to be my age you will have one hundred and ninety five favorite songs. That seems to be about the size of the playlist in my car. Although it is heavily weighted towards songs from the 80's and early 90's. I am probably not adding songs to my favorite list at the rate of five a year any more.
Some of you probably like music more than i do, so your list may be longer. That's fine for you. Different strokes and all. Spotify and the like have probably altered the way this process works. Super easy access to a much broader swath of music will probably result in a bigger favorites list. Fortunately i am not an anthropologist so i can just posit this question and then leave it be. I won't be up at night worrying about the implications of such matters. I have other things that keep me up at night that may be covered later.
It is safe to say this song is not going to make the playlist in my car, but now i know one additional song in the Top 10 and thus am a little less likely to make some faux pas when i am out in public. That's a pretty decent outcome for this particular experiment.
Later
Bob
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