It is true that a good jokebox really defines the personality of a bar. But I found it odd that the WaPo ran two articles on this topic in rapid succession. This one in the Sunday edition (which focuses on DC) and then this AP story three days later (focusing on Boston). Is this really such a hot topic? The key issue with the Internet models seems to be that there is such a thing as too many choices. I love picking out songs from a jukebox, but if I had unlimited choices, that would probably be overwhelming.
And speaking of expressing your personality through music choices in a digital world, there have been a rash of “What’s on your iPod?” stories in recent years. For example, Hillary Clinton’s top tunes were published recently and they included:
- Aretha Franklin “Respect”
- The Eagles “Take It to the Limit”
- The Beatles “Hey Jude”
- U2 “Beautiful Day”
Songs from Bush’s iPod were released last year:
- John Fogerty "Centerfield"
- Van Morrison "New Biography," "Brown Eyed Girl"
- John Hiatt "Circle Back"
- Alan Jackson
- George Jones
- Alejandro Escovedo "Castanets"
- Joni Mitchell "(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care"
- The Gourds "El Paso"
- Blackie and the Rodeo Kings "Swinging From the Chains of Love"
- Stevie Ray Vaughan "The House is Rockin’ "
- James McMurtry "Valley Road"
- The Thrills "Say It Ain’t So"
- The Knack "My Sharona"
The very variety of Bush’s list makes me think it’s phony; that it’s a list that was put together very carefully. If I’m wrong, then props to him, because I was really irritated by something in the Hillary story:
In a New York minute, H-Rod can shuffle from the bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll to the Fab Four in her iPod’s massive musical library. She told The Post her iPod has “got like 1,000″ songs stored away in its digital memory – offering a rare window into her private life.
Her hit parade is heavy on the mega-hits from the Rolling Stones, The Eagles and The Beatles…
She’s also downloaded the best of Motown and a bevy of classical masterpieces.
“I’ve got everything – a total smorgasbord,” she said.
A thousand songs? Please. I laugh at your thousand songs.
I hate when you ask someone what kind of music they like and they go, “Oh, I like all kinds.” When you pin them down, it turns out their taste isn’t very broad at all.
It reminds me of when Elwood Blues asks a woman what kind of music they have in her bar. She replies, “Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.”
Tags: digital jukebox, iPod lists, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush
3 Responses
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Ben Says:
Slate had a great piece on political playlists.
This was my favorite bit:
“Hillary Clinton is the least spontaneous of politicians, and this playlist suggests premeditation, if not actual poll-testing. She first indicates that she basically likes everything before coming to roost on classic rock and soul, which any baby boomer must identify with, lest she or he be branded terminally uncool. Hillary avoids, however, anything too racy, druggie, or aggressive, while naming tunes that are empowering and inspirational. On the world-is-divided-into-two-kinds-of-people question “the Beatles or the Stones,” she, like her husband, finds a middle path: both. She names no Stones songs and chooses a consensus, universally liked, neither-early-nor-late Beatles tune, “Hey Jude.” Hillary also manages a shout-out to racial diversity and feminism via Aretha Franklin, and she strikes a younger, socially conscious chord with U2. “Take It to the Limit,” on the other hand, is such a lame, black-hole-of-the-1970s choice that it can’t be taken for anything other than an expression of actual taste.”
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The Pop View Says:
However, Kevin Drum had this reaction to the Slate piece:
Everyone’s pissed off over Jacob Weisberg’s weird rant about Hillary Clinton’s iPod, and they’re right to be. He basically used it as an excuse to demonstrate that Hillary is exactly the conniving fake he always thought she was, and it’s likely he would have written the exact same thing regardless of what songs had made her top ten list. It was a remarkably lazy piece.
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jb Says:
yeah it’s weird. i was sorting through my genres in itunes and i thought they’d be pretty evenly distributed. incorrect. a lot more hip hop than i imagined. i think this also has to do with the fact that high school is when i amassed most of my cd collection (since transferred to the pod) and i was really into hip hop then.