February 03, 2005
News Flash: Celebrity Playlists Mostly Suck!
Okay, so take a guess. Which of the above three recording artists has an iTunes Playlist that doesn't suck? (Well, to be fair, we mean, "doesn't suck in our opinion.") The answer is at the end of this posting after the jump-link below.
But first, some background. The New York Post ran a feature a couple of weeks ago about celebrities and their music playlists that get published online. The playlists are Nick Hornby-esque catalogs along the lines of the personal Top Ten or All-time Favorite recordings. Think "High Fidelity," but instead of record-shop loser facing mid-life crisis, the song list is compiled by, say, Avril Lavigne.
Apple's iTunes online MP3 music store perfected the idea and by far provides the ideal model for this sort of thing, though several other major (legal) music download web sites have also made celeb playlists a feature of their content offerings.
Most of the celebs asked to contribute their playlists are, naturally, pop stars and successful musicians, which makes for, one hopes, revelations as to the musical influences on said celeb-musician's own sonic output. But famous actors, celebutantes and even novelsits (Nick Hornby, in a severely obivious kind of inverted irony, is among the celebs on iTunes) offer their favorite tracks.
The impression is that these are, by virtue of sharing their tastes with the public, recommendations and suggest the broader sense of muscial tastes and appreciation such accomplished musos-actors-whatevers are capable of far beyond what we know of them and their own music or, rather, from their mostly two-dimensional public personas.
This is where the concept can get silly. Most--and we emphasize "most"--of these playlists, in a word, suck. Some celebs seemed naturally suited to sucky playlists by the very nature of their fame. Others reveal a kind of sonic narcissism that manages to surprise even music industry cynics. As the Post article pointed out, superstar pop-R&B-soul-hip-hop diva Beyonce Knowles, lists mostly her own songs or those of her erstwhile pop vocal trio Destiny's Child. See, kids, forget the hype about rapper 50 Cent making it big on the strength of his DIY mixtapes--plugging your own music on your iTunes playlist is the way to promote yourself to supa' dupa' supa' stardom. (Ok, ok, we know--Enough snarkiness already.)
One notable exception to the shameless self-promo is that Beyonce likes a John Mayer song, which isn't exactly a huge leap--it's not as if she said she loves rockin' out to the Boredoms "Acid Police" or relaxing to ditties by Louis Armstrong or Merle Haggard, but rather it merely reveals that she's got a basic-cable package and has watched MTV at least once in the past two years.
Other playlists show a predictable tread of artists and music rougly equivalent to that of the playlist-maker. Ahem, John Mayer, by the way, as the Post also noted, does not have an interest in Beyonce's song book--none of her many popular hits is among his playlist.
The playlists, at least the better ones, tend to have notes explaining what the artist likes about the song or some related anecdote--as in the case of those compiled by Depeche Mode and Thievery Corporation. In a sense, the lists could also be interpreted as a celeb mixtape, and, not surprisingly, iTunes offers almost all of the songs included in these lists for sale on their music store, with direct links.
In a few minutes you could make the celeb playlist your very own. Imagine, say, ... a Carrot Top mixtape! (Well, we didn't actually see Carrot Top included among the celebs on iTunes, much to Apple's credit.)
With the mixtape in mind, another way to look at the list is as a creative endeavor in and of itself, or rather to think of it more like a true DJ mix and as a way to offer some insight not just into the tastes of the celebrity, but of the music itself. Which leads us to our favorite playlist on iTunes, which is by a spawn of rock royalty itself, New York DJ Mark Ronson.
His playlist doesn't suck. In fact, it's brilliant. Yup, Ronson is the answer to the question we posed at the beginning of the post. What Ronson has done is list about ten tracks, wherein the second of every two tracks he's selected is a hip-hop record that has sampled previous track, the first of every two songs selected on his playlist.
RELATED LINKS
A-List Does Playlist [New York Post]
Posted by typhoon at February 3, 2005 09:50 PM
