"Tell me what music artists you like, and I'll tell you who you are."
In my eyes--and ears--it's a very significant fact to know the "musical profile" of somebody. It carries a precision that pretends to carry objectivity--although it's in fact merely of subjective character.
NB: That's why I consider last.fm, a service to automatically share your playlists, to be a lot more private, but also more honest, than social platforms like myspace, facebook, etc.
Anyways, you do know by now that I admire Gilles Peterson (who by the way just launched his new website), but also Questlove from the Roots is one of the guys that cannot do anything wrong.
The Roots are currently touring Europe, and Questlove is furnishing his tourblog with a gorgeous video diary. Especially his adventurous chase of the Pussycat Dolls in the Cologne hotel lobby is an interesting piece of art.
4 comments:
I didn't get the reference to last.fm. Are you concerned because the data is gathered automatically rather than entered directly by the user?
Thanks for the remark.
No, it's not the fact that the shared data is automatically constructed from your playlists--although there is some unfair bias, since only absolute play count is taken as a factor, what discriminates long tracks--I just meant that what I called a "musical profile" (the list of personal musical preferences of somebody) leaves a stronger emotional imprint in the reader than a pure listing of facts (e.g. a CV) with which a reader usually doesn't affiliate emotions (provided that the reader does know the artists).
However, this associated emotional profile is purely subjective, and only projected onto the respective person, though pretending to be objective.
Is it understandable? I could further elaborate on it...
Thanks for explaining! The emotional perspective is definitely interesting. I understood your comment about the profile being more honest in a rather different way: As one doesn't enter the data oneself into last.fm, the resulting profile will in a sense be more "honest" compared to, say, the same user's musical profile on facebook where they might choose to include or leave out certain artists.
Oh, sure, that's what I had in the back of my mind, too. Although it would be just as easy (as senseless) to fake your playlists.
Let's say the current musical profile provides nice complementary information to your hard facts profile on facebook...
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