Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Posted at
07:03
by
Carly Carioli
1. We told you we'd let you know as soon as it was here: the title track from Converge's forthcoming No Heroes, complete and uncut:
2. While we were digging that up, we came across a bunch of newish/unreleased Tom Waits, from the 3-disc, vault-emptrying Anti set Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards:
3. Essential DJ sets of the month:
4. They said it couldn't be done: club-droppable Man Man remix. Bonus: Amanda Blank minus the Spank Rock.
5. Malcolm Gladwell narrates his latest New Yorker piece on whether computers can predict hits -- the print version of which includes, buried in the middle, the best, scarieset capsule description of that Platinum Blue technology we've yet enountered: a mathemetical explanation of why Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy":
The computer calculated, first of all, the song’s Hit Grade—that is, how close it was to the center of any of those sixty hit clusters. Its Hit Grade was 755, on a scale where anything above 700 is exceptional. The computer also found that “Crazy” belonged to the same hit cluster as Dido’s “Thank You,” James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” and Ashanti’s “Baby,” as well as older hits like “Let Me Be There,” by Olivia Newton-John, and “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey, so that listeners who liked any of those songs would probably like “Crazy,” too. Finally, the computer gave “Crazy” a Periodicity Grade—which refers to the fact that, at any given time, only twelve to fifteen hit clusters are “active,” because from month to month the particular mathematical patterns that excite music listeners will shift around. “Crazy” ’s periodicity score was 658—which suggested a very good fit with current tastes. The data said, in other words, that “Crazy” was almost certainly going to be huge—and, sure enough, it was.
