I’m gonna get technical, but you’ll soon know why. You don’t need to take up what I say. Bear with me. Here we go… Most websites have a lot of space to fill on their front page. More: the most distinctive action of the web is to link pages, and the web currently likes (and has for maybe fifteen years) a magazine format. So most front pages on the web stuff their space with as many ‘teaser’ links—of buttons, clickable images, text links—as possible. The most famous show of these, or the one people spring for, are the ‘Amazon Recommends’ links. But that’s not limited to Amazon‐as‐company—Google news feeds, or near‐any online shop, will also deluge a user with ‘For You!’ or ‘Recommended’ suggestions.
If you get down to the base idea, you’ll see these lists of links everywhere. Whether they are any use, I don’t know—some people likely click on them by accident, which happens with adverts a lot. I ’fess up—I don’t know the stats. What is notable is people’s reactions—they regard these lists as a joke. The lists don’t represent their interests. Ask, and people will give you a list of reasons why ‘Recommended For You!’ don’t work. Some people will even tell you they find the links coercive. They’ll say, “I don’t want to be told what I like!” Or deny they click on them.
To focus on music, it’s not true that people don’t like lists—some don’t, but the web is packed with self‐assembled playlists, and some people enjoy a rake through lists assembled by others, right? Like they still listen to radio, a DJ arranged playlist, or back in the day would leaf through a record collection, a friend‐assembled list. So the dispute is not with the idea of the link‐list—the dispute is with the quality, and the way it is pushed at the user. Now, I’d be off‐beam if I start talking about why auto‐constructed web lists get it wrong. But those lists highlight how recommendations don’t work personally either. People reject offerings by others—“Naw, don’t get that crew.” People who are into their music often don’t at all push their music, most they’ll do is offer up what works for them. A play area, not a prescription—fair, given the other person didn’t get to choose the station they’re tuned into.
So why is it so difficult to choose music that another will like? Talking Pop, Pop music is a multi‐layered performance possibility. There’s the instruments, the melodic progress, the rithm—throw in vocalists and then you have both the sound of a voice and lyrical content to consider. No surprise those academic attempts to analyse and nowadays create music are stupid. Inside this mesh you likely have little idea what people are listening for. Let’s take The Beatles. People will say they like the Beatles, but you don’t often know which part of The Beatles they like. Video footage will tell you a lotta people like to sing along to ‘Hey Jude’. Likely some kind of cultural lodestone. Bet they’re not listening to ‘Things We Said Today’ or ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’.
Ok, so many people are hooked by the sound of a singer. Singers are the lead on most Pop records. So let’s say you take that as the key factor. Let’s say you know somebody likes records by Minnie Ripperton. So perhaps they’ll like music by other novelty vocalists? But even then you don’t know what the novelty is—Roberta Flack? Tom Waits? overtone singing (though this would, suggested by web reasoning, at least be entertaining)? More consistently, let’s say you reason someone likes gravel‐voiced singers. You heard someone say they liked Joe Cocker, so do you think they might like records by Captain Beefheart? Unlikely. Before you get anywhere with a primary factor here, you got to start weighing other elements from the mesh. I can’t think of a case where singers are the only factor—song, arrangement and cultural references are also important.
Ask people, and it’s rare that they can explain what these factors are. They’ll tell you they like a ‘catchy tune’. I can tell you this will go nowhere. Fans of catchy tune ‘Blue Skies’ are unlikely to roll for ‘I Should Be So Lucky’—fact is, there’s more than a few kinds of ‘catchiness’. Then again, some can explain better. A friend from a while back, I asked him what it was worked for him in Rap music (I was aware that he liked some kinds of Rap music). Well, he said it was about the way a vocalist can improvise, or perhaps half‐improvise those words and get the vocalization to flow easy with, even sometimes against, the rithm set up by a music. Which is a description I could work with, though no way do I have a body of references to build from to understand where he could go with that… but his description was genuine and seemed to be something he could work with himself.
I remember I was once listening to some music I liked. A guy of African heritage was about, and he said the music was stiff. I get it. Music he liked had a big swing—ironically, a bigger and fuller swing than so‐called Jazz is supposed to have, more a full‐band swing like the music people call Funk (it wasn’t Funk). Least he had the decency not to say my music had no rithm, because it has. But that’s what he wanted from music. The Rock beat was ‘stiff’. And anything else I might be hearing like the melody, lyric or specific edges of playing, was for him sunk by a want of swing, or irrelevant. That’s when people fall back on ‘my thang’, but it’s more than that, it’s hearing something else in the moves.
Which brings up that you may not know what you like in something. A friend raised,
Especially when discovering things for oneself, you often get what you didn’t know you needed.
Or, as a journey, you may be discovering, by moving through music, what you like. For the record, the guy mentioned above and myself both found things we liked when we heard them while shopping. Me, I heard a track from the Rush covers album ‘Feedback’, and he heard an ambient track by ‘Susuma Yokota’ (for record, I think Susumu Yokota is out there). Neither music would be connected by any conventional link to stuff we usually listen to. But these musics did twang our universe. And in ways that were progressive, not a mass of static re‐enforcement. I’m planning to cover more on this in another essay. But hope you get the drift? Musical interests can be not only a complex, but an evolving complex, and it’s near impossible to make recommendations to a caotic system.
Which is why the following was a surprise. Sat with a mate, asked me which bands I’d written about recently. I listed them. Then he marked, “Not heard of them?” Oh Dear. I said, “Nineteen eighties, heavy, stacks of FX on stage and disc.” After all, I know my friend likes Talking Heads and that bloke from the Psychedelic Furs. “Play me some?” “I suppose the single…” I play the single. “Nice!” he says, “Play me some more!” I say, “You sure? I mean…” “More!” “Well, I suppose this is the most well known thing, nearest thing to typical…” I play the most obvious track. My friend starts laughing. “Amazing! More!” “Err, there’s this I suppose…” I can’t figure this, though I know he likes music—at one point, “Hark at that bass!” Then “More!” Finished our hours with “Why have I not heard of these guys?” (well I can answer that). It was like he’d heard a new world. I never would have guessed. And we’ve known each other maybe 20 years.
Then I’m with my girlfriend. She’s having a bad time. I prattle away to distract her. Tell her how when times were lean I sang old songs to myself, re‐wrote words to tunes, or invented new songs, She asks, “Like what songs?” “Oh, stuff, things I liked and knew well”. “Like what?” “Like this, I guess…” I play her a track. “That’s pretty…”,
You're the child
Of some electric nightmare
“…can see why that must have meant a lot to you at the time.” “Think I know most of the words. Good song.” “What else?” “Oh there was this…” “Go on.” This is someone who usually listens to Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)’ and Shakira. Nothing against them, but… “Most people would find this weird?” “Go on!” So I play. Can’t help singing along too. But then, second verse, hear her singing too. She breaks in, “Oh My God. I can’t believe someone has written a song about this!” She’s talking about the scenario, which is not that funny, but, “Ha‐ha, ha, ha!” The song finishes. “Send me it.” So I do.
See, you never can know. Which goes to show how talking music is a difficult thing. Creative, if the likes of Roland Barthes is to be believed. It’s not that I’m saying sales are the only answer. But if someone likes a thing, however obscure, then there’s something in it for them. The mystery, the adventure, is, ‘What’?