The Verge reports, and I already knew, because, though I am not a "kid," Spotify still wanted me to know where I stood in their system, which is FTVU:
Familiarity and variety... It's not paradoxical once you're familiar with a lot of things, which I, as an old person am. I also wanted to show you this — only because it's odd (and definitely "timeless," if by time, you mean the last century):
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My Myers Briggs score was kinda crazy.
Extrovert/Introvert (right in the middle)
Sensory/Intuitive (right in the middle)
Thinking/Feeling (right in the middle)
Perception/Judging (can you guess?)
hint #1: I'm 100% of one and 0% of the other
hint #2: Do you think I've made any mistakes on this blog?
not to be intrusive and rude (well, to BE intrusive and rude..), but professor?
What's the newest music you listen to? Anything from This century?
Ha! I use my husband’s Spotify account. We have very different tastes in music, so we were called Time Travellers because we like to explore new experiences. Still, Bob Dylan came out as top artist. My husband is a fan
Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob??
Cool. Now I can got to Spotify to get my horoscope.
LOL, I am "The Maverick" and my top artist was "Ringo Starr." I guess that says it all.
Solid selection.
I just checked mine and have Bowie and Radiohead as the top 2. I’m also a deep diver. (I like to listen to the whole album of the artists).
I didn’t even know about this feature until my son told me about it yesterday.
Pretty cool.
JAC,
If you are Spotify user, could you share your lists? Your music analysis posts are interesting.
Rudy Vallee was younger in 1970 than Mick Jagger or James Taylor or Bob Dylan is today, but everybody knew then that his career was 50 years in the past. OK, Boomers. Hang on forever.
My type would be "algorithm breaker." Whenever I get recommendations or see myself getting into a pattern...I'm gonna do the opposite or try something different. Or, I'll let someone else use my account and throw them an uninterpretable curveball. The algos often do recommend plausible exploratory content, but I pass on whatever they offer. I ignore it because they offered it...was the platform paid to promote anointed artists a la old school payola? Maybe? Probably? In response, I'll go for Classical or Pop Standards instead of new things...
Freedom from tech micromanagement through induced randomness and noise!
I find new music content on my own by scanning lists of recent album releases and trying things blindly.
I hate the farking algorithm choices myself. It's not purely algorithmic, it's humans pushing points of view, and I am certain of this, labels pushing certain recordings. There is so much great stuff that the algorithms seem to just ignore, and some songs that seem to get a lot of undeserved priority. The way I find songs I like is by listening to whole albums, and picking the ones I think are good and putting them on a list, the suggestions at the end of the list tend to be chart toppers that I could care less if I ever heard them again.
What I also like to do is take an album that has a lot of good songs and a couple of stinkers, like Diamonds and Rust, and making a playlist that just skips the stinkers.
Rudy Vallee is kind of an offbeat choice. On my old nano, I had the Whiffenpoof Song and Buddy Can You Spare a Dime which were themselves kind of offbeat choices for Rudy Vallee to have made....I have made no attempt to keep up with new music. I guess some of the new artists are talented and maybe I'm missing out, but we now have a hundred years of music to look back on and being a fuddy duddy is more fulfilling than being hip.s....I like Ruth Etting. She was big in the twenties and thirties. She had an untrained voice, and it showed. Kind of tinny, but on certain songs, she really delivers. She's got the definitive version of Ten Cents A Dance.....Apparently there are other people besides me who appreciate her work. Many albums of hers are available on Amazon Music.
My #1 most-played song for the year was Rudy Vallee's "Deep Night."
He's on my list because of just playing that one song.
The same is true for Joe Strummer: It's all one song. In Strummer's case, the song is "Mondo Bongo."
"What's the newest music you listen to? Anything from This century?"
Just looking at the 100 most-played songs list for 2022, there is only one song, I think: "Devil Eyes" by Hippie Sabotage. Just something that got in my head from TikTok.
I also listen to Grizzly Bear — "Sleeping Ute" and the cover of "Deep Blue Sea." I have some Vampire Weekend and Billie Eilish and "Simple Song" by The Shins on a playlist I use sometimes.
But there's a lot more old than new, and I don't like the computerized processing used in recording today. I enjoy finding especially old-timey things.
Anyway, I listened to lots of new music up through the end of the 90s when my sons lived with me. Went to many concerts (as a chaperone) in the 90s.
"I don't like the computerized processing used in recording today"
There is a whole Rick Beatto video on why Boomers, he are one, don't like modern music, and that is on the top of the list. It's "square" literally, the beats and notes are tied to grid squares in software.
Ann Althouse said...
.. I also listen to Grizzly Bear — "Sleeping Ute" and the cover of "Deep Blue Sea." I have some Vampire Weekend and Billie Eilis
Thanx Professor! I appreciate the response!
The AI on this is a bit underwhelming (maybe I should be impressed that it's not leaning in to collecting extraneous data) but between my running playlist and my kids using Spotify on the Echo in the kitchen, it's a bit confused about me. I would love to be able to say "ignore songs on these playlists" and "ignore songs played on these devices".
" On my old nano, I had the Whiffenpoof Song..."
The Whiffenpoof Song has a chapter in Bob Dylan's book, "The Philosophy of Modern Song."
"An in-crowd song, a song with a pedigree, a song in the Social Register. Not meant for the middle class to understand—seems to house a deep dark secret. From the tables down at Mory’s to the mysterious Louie and the dear old Temple Bar. Words of wisdom for those in the know. It paraphrases Kipling and lists a couple of songs no one’s ever heard. A lot of bones and skeletons in this song. Even the word Whiffenpoof is a word to dispel spirits, and the melody is ancient—the last gasp, the beginning of the end. This is a song sung by dues-paying members of the inner circle."
Dylan, Bob. The Philosophy of Modern Song (p. 69). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
I stream my music via Amazon Unlimited rather than Spotify. They recently added my 2022 Year In Review, and the top songs are unsurprising. When I play the My Likes and More station, which includes both songs I've liked and songs that are on albums that I play a lot, the algorithm sometimes plays one particular song that I didn't give a like to over one that I did from the same album. Case in point, it repeatedly plays "You Asked Me To" by Shannon McNally over "Black Rose," both from the album The Waylon Sessions from 2021. Same for "Time Will Show The Wiser" by Susanna Hoffs over "The Name of the Game", both from the album Bright Lights, also from 2021.
The last couple of years, I did a year-end countdown on Facebook in late December of my favorite new (or new-to-me) music that I had discovered during the year. This year's countdown will include some really great stuff, some from this year, some going much further back, courtesy of the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," such as the 1960 song "Hard Times Ahead" by Janis Martin. That song wasn't featured in the podcast, but one of her other songs was and it got me listening to her other music; it may not make the Top 10 but will probably get an honorable mention. I'll probably share my countdown here in the evening open thread once I start doing it.
I’m a Replayer. I stick to certain artists and songs and play them often.
Probably because I don’t really listen to Spotify that much. If I were describe myself it would likely be Lazy Listener. Just put on same long playlist. If I hear something I like, I add it to the playlist.
Re: the Wiffenpoof Song, I have a copy of this by Bing Crosby with Fred Waring and the Glee Club on 78 rpm!
Talk about old-timey!
I listen to very little of the music I grew up with. I'm soon-to-be 69.
I'm a YouTuber, and my mixes include Bob Wills, Jimmie Rodgers, The Mills Bros, The Ink Spots, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Merle Haggard, Leon Redbone, et alia. But I love electronic house music of today, too.
As a long-time music iconoclast, I don't expect anyone to like or approve my choices, so I rarely discuss such things with others.
Now Dylan ruined the whole mystique of the Wiffenpoof Song for a cheap paragraph.
Bah! Went and listened to it, Bob was having us on, or the song is on a high enough astral plane that it's safely ensconced in the rarified pantheon of the truly numinous songs, well protected from the drooling State U posers pathetic attempts at its delectation.
I just looked up the lyrics of the Whiffenpoof Song. One of the credited songwriters was Rudy Vallee. The guy had range. Not necessarily vocal range, but he wrote a great song. One of the other credited songwriters was Moss Hart. Maybe the great lines are his work....Great line: "Then we'll pass and be forgotten like the rest.".....I think James Jones had this song in mind when he titled his book "From Here to Eternity"....."Gentlemen singers off on a spree/Doomed from here to eternity/Lord have mercy on such as we". In the midst of life we are in death. It's even more poignant when you're looking back on a privileged life.
According to Wikisource: "Mory's refers to Mory's Temple Bar and Louis to a former owner of Mory's, Louis Linder. The chorus and much of the style; the scansion, though certainly not the mood, is derived from the poem "Gentlemen-Rankers" by Rudyard Kipling, which was set to music by Guy H. Scull (Harvard 1898) and adapted with lyrics by Meade Minnigerode (Yale 1910)."
Rudy Vallee had a recording of the song, but I'm not seeing him as the lyricist, and I don't thing someone with such a name as Meade Minnigerode should be overlooked.
I'm reading the lyrics and it seems like a drinking song. They're drunk. They like their bars, but they've got to find their way home.
Dylan also says you can make this elitist song your own, and people do: "Gentlemen rankers off on a spree, doomed from here to eternity. This song belongs to everybody, the fraternal order, the political machine, the silent majority, and the wealth of nations. It’s predetermined, ordained, and comes right out of the book of Fate. Terrifying and hopeless. Guaranteed to keep your spirits up. It’s standoffish and inaccessible—a Cabalistic song with a coded message. Sing it and it becomes entirely yours."
Spotify has versions by Louis Armstrong and by The Mills Brothers. I think the best version is by The Whiffenpoofs themselves. Dylan picked the Bing Crosby version.
If you're wondering how close the song is to Rudyard Kipling poem:
To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
To my brethren in their sorrow overseas,
Sings a gentleman of England cleanly bred, machinely crammed,
And a trooper of the Empress, if you please.
Yea, a trooper of the forces who has run his own six horses,
And faith he went the pace and went it blind,
And the world was more than kin while he held the ready tin,
But to-day the Sergeant’s something less than kind.
We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,
Baa—aa—aa!
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ballads_and_Barrack-Room_Ballads/Gentlemen-Rankers
Wikisource also says "The Whiffenpoof Song" is by Unknown... The song is the traditional closing number of The Whiffenpoofs, an a cappella group at Yale University. It was published in sheet music form in 1909."
So I'm not sure what is meant by that "Guy H. Scull (Harvard 1898)... Meade Minnigerode (Yale 1910)."
Seems like it began as a rewrite of Kipling.
I got Time Traveler. No DeLorean required.
I like to think that Rudy Vallee wrote an imperishable lyric and that Dylan missed the poignancy of those lyrics.....Last laugh. Maybe the Whiffenpoof Song will be around in a hundred years and it will all be over for Little Boy Blue.
I can see why Bob, the Man of the People and the Mystic, would hate The Wiffenpoof Song, but if you're into strange old songs for the windows they give us into the past, even the songs of rich, insufferable, Ivy League frat boys and their glee clubs can provide such a window. There are plenty of songs about schools and clubs you and I didn't go to, that still might have some nostalgic appeal. I haven't been to Naples or Venice, but wouldn't dismiss songs about those cities. "Paris" would have been better in that last sentence, but I actually have been there.
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