la vie en rose

I have a confession to make. I really like what some may consider crappy music. I saw an infomercial over the weekend advertising a CD compilation of all kinds of good stuff (1970's singer-songwriters) and I actually watched a good portion of it, just to hear some excerpts of the songs...oh yeah. When I was little (kindergarten up until age 13 and occasionally beyond, though I would not have admitted to it at the time) and we would take long car trips, I would bust out my Walkman and listen to a few cassette tapes over and over: Elvis love songs, Patsy Cline love songs, Anne Murray love songs, Bobby Vinton love songs, Neil Diamond love songs, Carpenters long songs, and Wacky Favorites, Volumes 1, 2, & 3. No wonder I have such a dichotomous view of love: warped, melancholy, lonely vs. love is the perfect end all to end all. What parent would let their 5 year old listen to Bobby Vinton sing about how lonely he is since his girl left him while he was at war? I blame him and Patsy and Neil and Anne and all them for making me a hopeless romantic.

So my friend Em turned me on to this website called Pandora Radio. Awesome! You set up your own radio station, enter in some artists or songs that you like, and it uses all kinds of fancy algorithms to play music that it thinks you will like. And it's all free! I listen to it all day at work. I put in Prefuse 73, RJD2, and Cut Chemist, and it plays me all kinds of what I call "J music" - I don't really know how to describe it - beats and indie hip-hop, I guess. I put in The Cure and I get some good Cure-type stuff. I put in Hall and Oates and Journey and I get awesome 1980's power ballads. I put in Marvin Gaye and I get 1960's-1970's soul. I put in Feist for modern indie rock. I put in Neil Diamond and Anne Murray and I get good cheesy love songs and some signer-songwriter stuff. I put in Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and the Glenn Miller Orchestra and I get all kinds of awesome big band music. I put in Spoon and Interpol and Bloc Party and get the best stuff. If you hear a song you like, you give it a thumbs up so it will keep playing the right stuff. And then if they play a song you don't like, you give it a thumbs down and it recalibrates your station. It thought I liked country based on my choice of Neil Diamond and Anne Murray. They were wrong, and now all the country is gone. Once it finally realizes that I love "Total Eclipse of the Heart" based on my selections, then I will know that technology is now smart enough to take over the world.