Mix That Funky Music

The host of a shindig I was attending last week asked if I could help provide the music by bringing my iPod (as if I go anywhere without the damn thing). While this is fine I don't think my acquaintance really understood what she was asking and of whom she was asking it.

What she was asking, unbeknownst to her, was: "Would you mind spending a few hours endlessly pouring over your entire music collection finding six or so hours of the most interesting and fun songs possible and arrange them flawlessly?" The answer: "No, I don't mind."

You see, I love art and music is simply a subset of that general term. I think about what the music being played around me. This is even true in stores where muzak versions of good tunes will either illicit cackling or tears (depending, of course, on my own mental fragility at that moment). I put my iPod on "shuffle" and it the next button eight or nine times until a song I want to hear comes up its massive randomized queue.

It's not as if my music collection was compiled by strangers in the dark, blindfolded, randomly downloading the obscurities of many disparate artists. I'm just not always in the mood for everything that "shuffle" will through at me. Sometimes it just not a Devo moment and other times nothing is more appropriate.

I'm sure most normal people can simply ignore the music they hear when it doesn't interest them. Those folks could probably just "shuffle" the iPod or rely on the "Genius" feature to mix it dynamically (don't get me started). I just can't. This is the case with most art I encounter. I think about the composition of billboards and the color schemes of cereal boxes and the faux-Indie tripe being played in bookstores.

So I spend three hours or so going over my 10,000+ songs and do, indeed, find about six hours of pure enjoyment. Starting with "Carnival" by the Cardigans and ending with "An Ending (Ascent)" by Brian Eno (and stopping for a bit at all points in between).

As it turned out, my acquaintance didn't use my mix but that really wasn't the point. It was good fun digging through my tunes finding out was wholly separate genres and groups went together nicely ("Emperor Tomato Ketchup" by Stereolab and "Heart of Glass" by Blondie for example). I may make mixes like this from time to time just to dig through the pile a bit (and become the dorkiest music snob in three states).