Popular Music
Y'all are going to have to get used to seeing a lot of posts about stuff I hear on This American Life, because it's amazing and wonderful and I'm listening to three or four hours of it a day now. Today's highlight was an interview with Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar, artists who hired some pollsters to ask people what they liked and did not like to see in art, and then created pieces based on the poll data. In every country they polled in except the Netherlands, the "ideal" painting was a landscape with a hill and a lake and a family and deer. You can see the results here. I wouldn't rank any of the popular paintings higher than inoffensive, but I actually found some of the unpopular ones more interesting to look at. I still wouldn't buy any of them though.
For their next trick, they got a composer on board and polled people about music. What came out for what should be the most popular pop song ever sounded like a late '70s mushy ballad duet, with lots of synthesizer. Awful. But the most unpopular song, the one designed to incorporate all of the most hated musical qualities, is the funniest thing I've heard in ages. Bagpipes and accordions. An opera singer rapping about cowboys and philosophy. Children squealing about Labor Day and George Stephanopoulos. I could not stop laughing. You can listen to it here, but know that it is 20 minutes long. The episode of This American Life is called "Numbers", and it's here.
For their next trick, they got a composer on board and polled people about music. What came out for what should be the most popular pop song ever sounded like a late '70s mushy ballad duet, with lots of synthesizer. Awful. But the most unpopular song, the one designed to incorporate all of the most hated musical qualities, is the funniest thing I've heard in ages. Bagpipes and accordions. An opera singer rapping about cowboys and philosophy. Children squealing about Labor Day and George Stephanopoulos. I could not stop laughing. You can listen to it here, but know that it is 20 minutes long. The episode of This American Life is called "Numbers", and it's here.