Friday, April 15, 2011

Another inexplicable Pandora moment

Apologies, just felt the need to bitch for a moment.  This happened three times yesterday, and again this morning.  Now I've got nothing personal against one Duncan Browne, but check out why he was just selected for my playlist:



As I've said before, this is after a number of months of 100% whac-a-mole on anything with "a vocal-centric aesthetic".  It's hard to get more "fail" than that.  As well, Pandora's "folk" tag seems to be one of several "I don't know what to do with this piece, so I'll stick it in this bucket" classifications, almost as annoying as "world music", whatever in the holy living hell that means.  (I dig all kinds of music from all over the world, and you know what?  It's all different enough to have separate freakin' names!  And seriously, what counts as "world music" in, say, Armenia?)

Bela Bartok wrote "folk" music, but that doesn't mean that a Bartok fan wants to hear Peter, Paul and Mary knockoffs all day.  Likewise, someone looking for Joan Baez might get a little freaked out at a microtonal maqam, especially one with adjacent large and small intervals.

And so, despite really enjoying the things that Davy Graham did with his instrumental music, I really truly am not interested in having something like "Anji", "Buhaina Chant", or "Mustapha" followed by a Dylan-knockoff protest singer.  I'm really not, and it would be awful nice for Pandora to stop doing that so reliably.

Okay, vent's done now.  I'll try to work more on Aerial Boundaries today at lunch, to make up for it.  :-)

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