the worst music ever
Via Andrew Sullivan and Scott McLemee, an interesting piece of intentionally bad music. According to the blog Dial M for Musicology, a couple of Russian conceptual artists – Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid - in the 1990s hired a polling firm to discover what Americans hated in music. Then, they wrote an intentionally bad song. All I can say is that it’s engaging in a very unique way, but worth the listen. Check out America’s Most Unwanted Song. It made my baby cry.
UPDATE: People have only been listening to the first few seconds. You have to listen to the whole thing. It’s a gestalt thang.
Bit like the reverse of America’s (The World’s?) favorite painting, from a few years ago.
Kieran
April 20, 2008 at 12:43 am
It wasn’t Motorhead, so where is your argument?
C Smith
April 20, 2008 at 12:47 am
I don’t know — I gave the song 30 seconds and there’s much worse music than that. But, then again, this is all a matter of taste and culture.
tf
April 20, 2008 at 12:51 am
Keiran: It’s done by the same crew.
C Smith and tf: Did you even get to the Yom Kippur part?!?!
fabiorojas
April 20, 2008 at 12:53 am
Did not make it that far…
Is this an instance where extra-cultural rationality and judgment comes in? Or, maybe we’ve just been conditioned to think that this is “bad” music.
tf
April 20, 2008 at 12:57 am
Well, it’s executed in a competent fashion, but the idea is they do all the things that make music bad, which are universal. Clashing styles, super fast/slow tempos, abrupt register changes, tubas, etc. Things any human would find nasty.
fabiorojas
April 20, 2008 at 12:59 am
So, some things just are wrong: tubas and ferrets as pets.
tf
April 20, 2008 at 1:07 am
The antichrist has a pet ferret who plays the tuba.
fabiorojas
April 20, 2008 at 1:13 am
We need to watch it, ferret lovers are still our bread-and-butter “base” here at orgtheory.
tf
April 20, 2008 at 1:16 am
I’m not worried. They’re the Pauly Shore of our blog – the more you tease them, the more they come around.
fabiorojas
April 20, 2008 at 1:23 am
Sounds a lot like Nightwish.
Esteban
April 20, 2008 at 2:05 am
How can you not love this song? An opera singer that raps cowboy music as bagpipes play in the background? Children singing a song dedicated to Yom Kippur? Awesome!
Also, where the heck have you over-educated geeks been? This project was featured on This American Life years ago. I thought that listening to public radio was highly correlated with geekiness. You guys are late to the party, man.
I like that episode of TAL a lot. There’s a woman who ran her love life through Excel, turning little tragedies and disappointments into data points, which smoothed out the minor disturbances of life into a smooth little histogram. Imagine what you can do with Stata or R! (assuming, of course, there is enough data, which you may or may not want depending on your attitudes towards romance).
belle lettre
April 20, 2008 at 3:48 am
assuming, of course, there is enough data
Sounds like a multi-choice answer array. “If you were to analyze your love life, which of the following methods would be most appropriate to use:
a) Single-case ethnography.
b) Multi-site ethnography with revisits.
c) Mill’s method of difference.
d) QCA/Fuzzy sets.
e) OLS.
f) Multilevel models with random effects.
Kieran
April 20, 2008 at 4:14 am
I guess for those who haven’t had much of a love life, auto-ethnography is the method of choice.
Omar
April 21, 2008 at 11:50 am
[...] 21, 2008 The Worst Music Ever Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized Via OrgTheory. [...]
The Worst Music Ever « Entitled to an Opinion
April 22, 2008 at 12:43 am
You have to listen to the TAL episode. The woman counted any romantic encounter, be it a single date, a single kiss, or even a crush or something, along with longer-term relationships. By just binary coding, the nuances of the data were lost, and so she just felt like a player some years (her slutty year in Europe–me and David Hasselhoff do better in Europe), when in fact those were years of many romantic disappointments.
I kind of like the idea of decontextualizing the experiences into data points, but the social scientist in me dislikes the dishonesty of equating real romance with disappointment.
Auto-ethnography = diary, something teenage girls have been doing for years.
belle lettre
April 22, 2008 at 6:10 am