Very interesting Mixes

I recently completed one of my major "media projects" (read: wastes of time) - rating all the music in my iTunes library. It was a long journey and I had many strange adventures along the way. Like an anti-depressant that cures ED, one of the happy side effects of my indulgent and arbitrary objective was that I now have dozens of new and fascinating playlists.

As I worked my way through hundreds of tracks I hadn't listened to literally since switching to iTunes, I felt compelled to start grouping songs together the way I thought about them. I had a sophisticated system. I started with a playlist of a few hundred songs I felt I should rate next. I'd listen to these over a couple of weeks and rate them, and if I felt like it would fit with a list I already had or if I felt the song illustrated something other songs could also exemplify, I saved it first to a seperate playlist on my iPod and then to one of several mixes through my laptop.

What I ended up with was sort of an aural mind map. It reminds me of the shelves at Movie Library in Santa Fe. I have playlists like Songs for Driving Around Southern California With the Top Down, Songs about Trains, the Best 50 Songs Eva, Music I Really Want to Make in to a Music Video, a list of music that I had wanted to use in a stage project called Funny Bunny Dances several years ago but never got around to doing, and on and on. I'm experimenting with ways to publish them now.

So I finally got to the through all my playlists of unrated songs (not quite the end, actually, as I can't bring myself to listen to Vickyheart's CD of her vocals on opera classics with a critical ear) and what should I find at the end of my media critiquing rainbow but a big pot boredom. Like a bribed schoolchild, I found that without my goal of rating and making playlists, I now had no interest in listening to music.

The solution? Another playlist, of course! As I'd rated music, I had noticed that I was rating some songs higher than I really felt they deserved just because I wanted to listen to them once or twice before. Not wanting to bias my completely subjective exercise with these my own subjective allowances, I created a new playlist for music I was interested in listening to again with the title "interesting music." It was here I found a new arbitrary objective to distract me once my first arbitrary objective ran out.

As I went through the songs in my "interesting music" playlist, I noticed they really comprised two categories. First, there was the songs I'd just wanted to listen to once or twice more. Maybe I wasn't sure of the rating I'd given them, or there was something inthem that had caught my ear but I didn't feel like listening to it the first time through, or I thought they may be material for one of my playlists but I couldn't immediately figure which, or whatever.

The other, much more fascinating category was songs that were interesting and I thought may always be interesting no matter how many times I listened to them. I've posted this playlist, "ribble's Interesting Music," on iTunes.