Category: Music

So, what are the results of the Christmas Tunes Experiment? I’ve had a playlist of the songs on the Jefitoblog Holidy Mix Tape (plus a few other things) locked into the iTunes Party Shuffle while I work on the computer at home. At work, I stuck with the usual four-and-five-star playlist in the lab, because,… Continue reading The Christmas Tunes Experiment: Results

As previously established, I don’t much care for Christmas music. Last year, I compiled the few holiday songs I owned, and came up with a whopping ten, and that required stretching things a bit. Based on comment thread recommendations, I expanded that to 22 songs (mostly by adding Sufjan Stevens tracks), but it’s still not… Continue reading The Christmas Tunes Experiment

The AV Club (I promise I’m not actually turning this blog into theonionavclubwatch.com, but I do like their stuff) had a discussion of Christmas music a little while ago, which collides with last night’s campus holiday party in interesting ways. Let’s just say that there are few things in this world as horrible as a… Continue reading Classic Edition: Why I Don’t Like Christmas Music

It’s more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling “Year’s Best” lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I’ll throw this open… Continue reading Call for Nominations: Pop Song of the Year

Friday’s a good day for silly pop music lists, so here’s a couple adapted from a “meme” via Jamie Bowden: Go to http://popculturemadness.com and find the Greatest USA Hits of the year you turned 18. I refuse to spend a bunch of time dinking around with typefaces, and I’m not going to list all 75… Continue reading Top of the Pops

A couple of weeks ago, when I bought the new Hold Steady album, I also picked up Sam’s Town by the Killers. I bought it in spite of some pretty harsh reviews, but in the end, I think that The Onion’s AV Club got it right: The Killers have created a batch of easily digestible… Continue reading You Gotta Believe

Ben over at the World’s Fair is looking for a house band for ScienceBlogs. He goes on for a while about Phish, which is kind of bizarre– you can’t be stoned enough to appreciate Phish while also retaining the ability to do math. He also suggests a few slightly more obvious nerd bands– Devo, They… Continue reading The All-Important “House Band” Question

Henry Farrell thinks he sees a parallel between music critics and the Mafia: I think that there’s a similar problem in the relationship between music artists and music consumers, in which critics play a key brokerage role, just as the Mafia does in a rather different sphere of commercial relations. Critics serve to guarantee to… Continue reading Nice Music Library, It’d Be a Pity If Anything Happened to It…

Thinking a little more about the soundtrack post from a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the fact that I don’t seem to have the same strong associations with more recent songs that I do with some older stuff. It’s not that I’m buying less music, I don’t think, but rather that iTunes… Continue reading Radio Simulation