Your Music or Your Life

As far as we can tell, Amazon.com started this business of "People
who bought this book/CD/movie also bought" and "If you like these, you’ll
also like this". Nowadays this technology, with varying degrees of sophistication,
invites us to try everything from wines to life partners.

One new company we have been looking at, Predixis,
claims to understand the "deep characteristics" of your favorite
music; using pattern recognition to analyze timbre, timing, harmonics
and
other acoustical attributes. Supposedly, after you downloade and install
it on your computer, it analyzes your entire music collection and tells
you what you are missing, and what you would like. Hmmmm. Tempting, but
we always go through an agonizing crucible of cost/benefit and risk analysis
before installing unknown shit on Old Betsy, as we have begun referring
to our aging hemispheric iMac.

One of the problems is that we have all sorts of music on our hardrive
that we HATE, but for one reason or another refuse to delete: sappy Christmas
carols, croony Latin pretty boys in the Englebert Humperdink mold with
nicknames like "El Puma" and "El Maximo" who Norma
Yvonne listens to, post-Apocolyptic acid industrial house mix from number
two son, etc.
We can’t imagine the effect this would have on the recommendations,
and finding and segregating all the offending tunes would too closely
resemble work to seriously contemplate.

What we would really like is something simple and straightforward, down
and dirty. Enter your list of the 10 absolutely greatest songs ever recorded,
and find out A) did anyone else pick EXACTLY the same ten songs, and
if so who are they and what are they doing with their lives, and B) of
all the people who agreed with us on NINE out of TEN, what was the differing
tenth?

This would be both a way of finding people with eerily similar tastes
in music (and other thing?) and of finding new stuff you would probably
like.

Just for the record, the TEN ABSOLUTELY GREATEST SONGS ever recorded
are (in no particular order):

• Hotel California – but not the Eagles version, the Spanish language
  version by the Gypsy Kings from the movie the Big Lebowski – spectacular
  guitar

• Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D, performed by King Crimson and the
  California Guitar Trio; who knew Bach’s organ classic was really intended
  to be
  played by a guitar trio? Mind blowing…

• Jimi Hendrix – All Along the Watchtower; the best of many possible
  choices

• El Preso, a 30-year-old salsa song that remains the best, hottest
  Salsa song ever recorded, by Fruko, a Colombian triple murderer who
  sang his
  way out of prison.

• For What It’s Worth, Buffalo Springfield; a perfect pop song, when
  we first heard it on the radio in 1967 (for what its worth, the Dowbrigade
  was 13 at the time), the DJ played it three times in a row, he couldn’t
  believe it either.

• Layla, Derek and the Dominos; Duane Alman and Eric Clapton sliding
  celestial

• Corazon Espinado, Santana; the hottest single guitar track of all
• Brown-eyed Girl, Van Morrison; narrowly beating out Sweet Thing and
  Let the Healing Begin

• Sweet Jane, Lou Reed; either version, greatest rock song ever written
• I Can See For Miles, the Who; the one-note guitar solo really does
  it for me

Close runners up include Atom Heart Mother, Chan Chan, Uncle John’s
Band, Always With me, Always with you, Water Song, Glycerine, Like a
Hurricane, Girlfren, so many more.

Yes, this clearly brands us as an old fart, burn-out hippie. In addition, it has not escaped our attention that the list includes nary a female except
in the song titles. Misogyny? Actually, the Dowbrigade has a whole section
of female vocalists in his vaults but usually only listens to them when
he feels sad, or it is raining.  Go figure.