Saturday, May 17, 2008

King's Wonders

I recently read a column on ET that amounted to Stephen King's top 25 rock and roll songs. Though it's obvious that his and my musical tastes don't intersect, it was still an interesting read, and head and shoulders above the usual crap that one finds on that website, which has taken to offering us such spelling disasters as "hawt" and "toot suite", as though the rise of mangled Textglish is a good thing.

I'm no good at picking my top 25 anythings. I make a list of a hundred songs or movies and start to pare them down and I just can't do it. It's easier for me to pick 25 things I really don't like, or to prefer one thing over another. I prefer U2 to REM, for example, but I couldn't tell you what my favorite U2 song is. I prefer the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, but I couldn't begin to guess my favorite Beatles song. I prefer Insomnium to Carpathian Forest, but the Carpathian Forest song "A Forest" is pretty darn good, so where does it lie on the favorites scale?

What I can do is list my top 25 songs on my iPod as measured by play count:

1. Corporeal Jigsore Quandary Carcass
2. The Gale Insomnium
3. Zodijackyl Light Dark Tranquility
4. Mortal Share Insomnium
5. Daughter of the Moon Insomnium
6. Still Moving Sinews Dark Tranquility
7. Keep On Rotting in the Free World Carcass
8. Jesus Tod Burzum
9. At the Fathomless Depths Dissection
10. Jotun In Flames
11. Funeral Fog Mayhem
12. In the Groves of Death Insomnium
13, Shattered by Broken Dreams Avenged Sevenfold
14. Why Me? Planet P
15. Big Log Viktor Krauss
16. A Forest Carpathian Forest
17. Justifiable Homicide Dismember
18. I troldskog fareb vild Ulver
19. I Ran A Flock of Seagulls
20. Dance With You Bowling for Soup
21. Rock the Vote Carcass
22. Freezing Moon Mayhem
23. Incarnated Solvent Abuse Carcass
24. Scythe, Rage and Roses Dark Tranquility
25. Dunkelheit Burzum

This isn't really terribly accurate because I've never reset my play counts and certain bands, notably Dark Tranquility and Carcass, score high on the mainly because of longevity, while a lot of the stuff I listen to today isn't on the list because it's too new. But, in terms of frequency, there's my Top 25. It troubles me.

2 comments:

Barbara said...

Wow... hehe... I can't say I recognize many of those songs at all... a few, yes...but not many. I may need to broaden my musical tastes some, I'm thinking.

William said...

I was thinking the same thing, only about myself - it wouldn't hurt me to sample a bit outside of my normal diet of death metal and black metal. Maybe I should become a huge, huge fan of hip-hop. Word!

On second thought, I don't think so. Word not!