Right now I’m working through a playlist of several hundred tracks from different sources: Email attachments, CD rips, RSS feeds, Etc. A lot of this listening is a job. And like any job, I’ve thought about how to organize and streamline it. It would take a lot of time and screen shots to go through the applescripts and filters I’ve written for iTunes, but I thought I would share a few basic ideas/tips that I use for getting through the pile. This works best for getting through lots of unknown/new artists, tracks you’re curious about but not committed to reviewing or writing about or even keeping yet.

1. Create a folder or playlist and treat it like an inbox.
Just like it’s inconvenient to check multiple applications and sites for your various email accounts, it’s inconvenient to stream music on Hype Machine, find MP3s scattered around your laptop/iPod, hit play inside every RSS feed in your feedreader, etc. At least for me it is. So I have one playlist on iTunes that anything new must go to. I download anything I want to listen to, rip CDs and put them in that playlist, add podcast MP3 streams, etc., and it all goes into that folder, which automatically adds tracks to the playlist.

This doesn’t work for stream-only tracks, which is probably why I don’t usually listen to stream-only promos.

2. Decide what happens to music once you listen to it. Make rules.
Is one listen enough to decide whether to keep something or research the band a little more? Is five listens? How about keeping, deleting, or re-listening to tracks once you’ve rated or tagged them as worthwhile? This is especially important for the blind listens, when you’re just trying to discover new stuff.

3. Make a smart playlist with those rules and filters. This is the playlist you will listen to.
My playlist says that tracks must come from my inbox playlist, and that they must be unrated (plus six other, less important rules). This is my “new music” playlist. This works best in iTunes, but I know other players have filters.

4. Make yourself a ‘trash’ playlist to go with your inbox playlist.
This is how you know what to delete. Make rules for this as well — if you skip a song more than three times, if you rate it below two stars, etc. Once in a while, go to this playlist, select all the tracks, hit option + delete, and get rid of the tracks permanently. I’m not precious about keeping whole albums, so this doesn’t bother me, of course.

(Bonus Tip) If you’re using iTunes, listen to your playlist through the iTunes DJ function.
If you make “unrated tracks” part of your filter criteria, then the song you are listening to will stop playing if you rate it during playback. If you are listening to the iTunes DJ, it won’t stop playback. Just set the “Source:” (bottom left corner) to the playlist you need to get through to work this way.

(Bonus Tip) Download the NPR script from Doug’s Applescripts
Here’s the link, but it’s down right now. This script will make it so that, once an hour, iTunes will go to NPR.org, download the latest five-minute hourly news update, and queue it after the currently playing track. It’s like creating your own NPR station. I call mine WBRR (Worst Blog Rock Radio).

There’s so much more I could mention about tags, filters, applescripts, hot keys (I made it so I don’t have to switch to iTunes to rate tracks, just hit option + apple + number to rate tracks) that I think makes all this even easier, but I got it all from Googling. You can too. Plus, that stuff is so specific to the way I listen to music, I doubt it would be useful to that many people. Anyway, I hope the rather general (though, admittedly, iTunes specific) things above help you. EDIT: I’ll try and do another post soon with download links to scripts and actions that couple help. Just have to organize and upload them.

I just read something very bothersome, although it’s probably more bothersome to Rich, my editor at VH1 (who also runs FourFour (I may be the only person who knows those things in that particular order)), than it is to me. Quickly: Rich edited together this supercut of moments in horror films where the characters’ cell phones die. On Youtube it has over 300,000 views:

This week an NPR writer did a story on the horror cliche of the dead cell phone. She never acknowledges Rich’s video, though her piece uses the same audio, has the same subject matter, etc. Here’s the audio from NPR:

Download audio file (20100505_me_20.mp3)

She does link to it in her piece online, but she only did so after Rich wrote about it, and some of his commenters commented on her story. What’s bad about this?

First, she basically uses the same films that Rich does. I mean, she adds in one or two new films (which she points out in her defense Tweet (defense Tweet!)). But she likely added them in for relevance (when you’re a writer and you pitch a story you have to connect it to something timely in order to get your pitch heard). And she interviews a couple of horror fans in California. But in her piece she’s basically providing running commentary for what she sees in Rich’s video. It’s not like he just randomly threw together all the clips either — he organizes them into sort of mini clichés and subcategories. The same groupings that she uses, and, worse (from a “that probably took him a long time” POV) and she uses the audio from his clips.

So why this sucks in a more-than-wanting-credit way: Curating and collecting is such a big part of a music or pop culture writer’s skill set. Not crediting curation, indexing, etc., is like not crediting someone who created a playlist or a DJ mix. This is terrifying when half your job involves recalling details and putting them together. And terrifying when the other half — reviewing records — becomes less needed/wanted. Maybe what we put it together isn’t our work, but putting together is work.

I’m thinking also of Rich’s gif walls for Ru Paul’s drag race, which, when viewed, create this hypnotic, hilarious, disturbing collage of big and small gestures. If Rich had presented this as a “piece” like the Wrath of Khan video

…there be no question of having to credit him. And couldn’t you see one of these posts becoming some huge, multi-television, three stories high piece at the New Museum (except, I think the New Museum is just awfully designed, but you know)? It’d be great! It’d be art. And it would be credited or acknowledged. But since it’s inside a blog post, then it doesn’t get the same sort of treatment.

Now if she didn’t want to acknowledge this as her idea (and maybe she did come up with it independently), she had to acknowledge that a lot of the heavy lifting was done for her, right? This YouTube video is compiled research. When I was a linguistics undergrad I collected sounds and samples for a research project called “Instances and Examples of -iz Insertion in Urban English.” That’s one way of saying I collected, recorded, and saved every time I heard someone use “shizit,” “snizzle,” “nizzle,” etc. in hip hop, in interviews, TV shows. Had I compiled those (my shizzle reel), then that’d have to be acknowledged as research too. But once again, blog post /Youtube = not real?

Now I think the other big problem — which I noticed when I uploaded my compilation of Kristin Stewart sighs — is that YouTube doesn’t acknowledge supercuts are works you own. YouTube has no regard for fair use whatsoever. You aren’t even supposed to upload works you didn’t shoot and edit yourself, so YouTube can take things own based on that alone. But if they don’t acknowledge fair use, then it’s harder to expect other people to use stuff fairly.

Rich, in his post about the NPR piece, knows that it’s one of the problems with making and releasing stuff online. In fact, when I interviewed at VH1, Rich complimented my Twilight video and I sat there almost polishing my nails on my shirt. Only later did I realize that he had done a ton of these, tons I had seen and enjoyed. But I never knew they were his, because they were embedded without attribution on a lot of other sites.

My ladies’ size 0 carpal tunnel wrist guard. I wish they had gone all out and made a wrist guard that looks like a Beyonce / Metropolis robot hand. Also, I’d like a robot hand when my wrist finally breaks off.

The piece starts out with this:

Before we begin, let us be clear: We speak not of the Rivers Cuomo that was, nor of the Rivers Cuomo that is, nor yet of the Rivers that shall be. We speak, now, of the Platonic ideal of a Rivers Cuomo: The Rivers Cuomo you have never met, nor ever can meet, nor can ever be sued by (subsequent to writing a blog post that uses his name quite a lot), but who lives, nevertheless, within your brain. Specifically, if you happen to have grown up in the 1990s, and are heterosexual, and also a girl.

And then breaks up into headings like “Seduction” “Consummation” “Couples Therapy” etc. and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of Rivers Cuomo as the secret boyfriend we ladies wished we had at some point in our pre/teen years.

I had to turn off the rest, because that is not how I related to Pinkerton at all when I first heard it, or when I listened to it in college. Obviously my relationship to Pinkerton is complicated, but not because I loved him then discovered he was a creep, or even because I related to him and then was repulsed (further complicating things, of course, is that I am still working on the 33 1/3 Pinkerton book, to be published posthumously). But it is a bit closer to the latter. The latter is harder, and tons more interesting to me, because if I believe that I was a Pinkerton fan because I related to it (him? Or the him that is part bio, part stolen from Harvard classmates, part fictional character, part Capt Pinkerton), and now it makes me uncomfortable, then I have to work on the reasons why I related to it. But I do not feel cheated by Pinkerton or Cuomo.

Also I have a lot of notes (some on books, some song-by-song reactions, some free-associated, some labored over) about Pinkerton. I found this from some early notes (I think I was trying to sketch out why I thought I was qualified to write about Pinkerton):

I understand how desire can transform into hate or apathy. I understand that sometimes a collection of charcteristics [sic] can stand in for any sort of real attraction. I understand desire as purely a way to satisfy a lack of honesty or to fill in a self-loathing. To let that self-loathing form an inverse proportion to a capacity for love.

Also later, a pretty cryptic line: ” I never found an outlet for that paralysis.”

The paralysis above refers to the further above, a basic relating-to-boys paralysis, not my Pinkerton fandom. My natural reaction in middle school to hearing Nirvana and Weezer was to buy a guitar and insist on lessons, not crush on guys that looked like Kurt Cobain and Rivers Cuomo.

I will stop here, since I have the book to write. I will say, however, that I haven’t written anything so far about My Personal Relationship To Pinkerton. I’m sure it’ll show up, but it’s still not the most interesting aspect of Pinkerton for me, so I doubt it would be to anyone else. I’ll re-read the piece this weekend.

My thing (or rather my couple of things) with this M.I.A. video is that, like most of M.I.A.’s art, it’s unsubtle yet still unclear. It’s not “pointlessly violent” as some people are arguing on Stereogum, nor pointed. It’s just blunt. We’re left to debate whether this is okay in a video:

Rather than whether this is okay, period.

Her art is about her, first, always. But she has other, better ways of doing this. I interviewed her about her Kala cover art for Paper Thin Walls:

I did find that Qaddafi is one of my artistic influences, which might be really hard to diminish. But if you look at Col. Qaddafi, the way he dresses, he takes backdrops really seriously, to the point where he has his bodyguards carry backdrops carry backdrops with them. And every time he’s photographed, he pulls them out, and he makes sure he’s photographed against these pineapple prints and things like that. I was really inspired by that, I think it’s so interesting. If you look at all African dictators, especially someone causing the most crazy chaos, they’re really fashionable, and really into art, and really camp. I found all those things really, really interesting. So my inspiration comes from that mash-up of those two things. Of having these African dictators and their obsession with image control, but their choices in fashion and art and colors is so loud and and crazy. I don’t know. It’s really gory, you know?

Not necessary subtle, but with interesting threads and connections and little self-righteousness. The Kala album cover was about image control. Maybe “Born Free” is about image control. But that would be really cynical of her. Though she hasn’t responded to any backlash-y stuff, I think that her response would go somewhat like the responses in that same Stereogum thread:

– You don’t like this because you don’t realize that this happens EVERY DAY.

– Maybe it’s stupid, but doesn’t the fact that we’re here, debating it actually make it genius?

The first is just meant to shut down any discussion. The second I’ve always found idiotic, whether applied to art or to say, Sarah Palin (doesn’t the fact that was are talking about her/she can stay in the news make her a sort of media genius?). The (other) usual defense, that she’s fascinating because of her contradictions would only work if her contradictions were fascinating. Note: M.I.A. herself wouldn’t find this an acceptable defense. But that’s what makes her so compelling, right? (No.)

And finally, for a much better time watching exploitation as education, rent Men Behind The Sun. I would make some animated gifs from it and post them if I didn’t think I would have day vomits and nightmares for the next week.