Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Rating Songs
Thursday
June 8, 2006
"Haven't you noticed we live in a moronic country?"
-Robin Quivers, regarding Ann Coulter's book being ranked #3 in the country, 6/8/2006
There's an interesting aspect of the iTunes program that I didn't really understand until I bought my new computer, which allowed me to run it (since Windows ME didn't have the juice to crank it.) It's the star rating system for judging songs.
In many ways, rating songs seems strange to me, a slightly uncomfortable process of grading art. When I reviewed music for The Tennessean in 1993-1994, I was never entirely comfortable with the subjectivity of it all, though it was a nice way to get a major newspaper on my résumé while still in high school.
But, with your music, isn't it all subjective? What I consider genius another might consider drivel. And I have the power to assign the rankings as I see fit, for my machine, so it's more of a way to purge the songs that I'd prefer to skip in the "party shuffle" mode at a cursory glance.
I have to hand it to Apple: their business model with iTunes and the iPod was a stroke of brilliance. It does annoy me that they spell it iTunes, with a lower-case i at the beginning; dammit, if I want to write Itunes, I should be able to write it that way without having to worry about some nitwit correcting me. It is still worlds better than the Nintendo Wii (pronounced "We"), or parents who give their kids bizarre spellings of names to "make them special" -- as if they otherwise wouldn't be special. No, you've just cursed them to a life of constantly having to correct the spelling for every hotel clerk and person filling out their name on a form whom they ever encounter.
Take it from someone who goes by his middle name: me! The irregular name route is a bitch. My parents didn't have much of a choice in my situation; the name Charles was used by many people in my family, and as a legacy name (my late Grandpa Pickney went to great lengths to win the battle with my Grandma to name my father Charles Jr.) my name was pretty much decided, so they had to go with the middle name route for me to avoid confusion. So I don't begrudge them for that at all.
But I'm talking people who take the name Katherine and spell it Khathyryn or something stupid like that. It's not the kid's fault. But it makes me want to go slap the parents around a bit. Don't do that to your kids.
Jumping off the soapbox, tonight was a good night for entertainment. The Artie Lange roast on the Howard Stern show tonight was easily the funniest roast I've ever heard anywhere. Colin Quinn was hysterical. With that, along with the Mavericks win over the Heat on ABC, there was plenty of bang for my entertainment buck. With Bubba on vacation this week, Stern has had some great shows to cover the gap. The Eric the Midget stuff has literally made me laugh until I've cried at times. Good times? You'd better believe it.
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