2009 Review

As if blogging about the first song that pops into my head every day isn't myopic, anal, and geeky enough, now you get an entry with line graphs and pie charts documenting the statistics of 2009. So now, with minimal preamble, I present to you the Eras, the Ratings, the Genres, the Artists, and the Whatnot of The Songs in My Head, 2009.

Vital Stats:
Starting date: February 8, 2009
First song blogged: Truckin' by the Grateful Dead.
Number of Entries: 292
Oldest songs: Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1787, and Chopin's Marche Funèbre, 1837, referred to in two entries.
Newest song: Several from 2008.

So, the charts are fairly self-explanatory, but that doesn't mean I won't do some 'splaining. (Click on any chart to see a larger version.) This first one shows us the spread of eras (mostly by decade) of the songs that popped into my head in 2009. It's no surprise, really, that songs of the '70s and '80s dominated my unconscious musical landscape, and that, in general, songs released closer to or overlapping my actual lifetime make up the vast majority of the songs that float into my head.


This next chart documents the ratings I've given the songs in my head in 2009. At the outset of the project, I was very curious about the ratio of songs I love versus songs I hate that randomly come to mind. I'm pleased to report that I was at least warm to if not downright in love with most songs in my head last year! Now, let's take a moment to acknowledge that The Songs in My Head is not an attempt to document *every* song that enters my conscious thoughts (I have a life, okay?) but a project aimed at documenting the first song, and maybe the first couple songs, that come to mind each day upon waking. So for all we know, the ratio of ALL songs that float into my brain may be skewed more toward the cold end. Nevertheless, I think the sample here is significant.


This pie graph represents the top 15 genres that have graced my cranial airwaves in 2009. Again, no surprise here that commercial pop, indie, and classic rock are the dominant genres that come to mind.


If you examine the genre chart closely, you'll notice that there are a lot of categories that fit together or have significant enough overlap that we might combine them to get a simpler picture. So, for the sake of argument, let's say "Indie/Alternative" would encompass punk, post-punk, new wave, synth-pop, and power pop; "Rock" would include classic and standard rock, singer-songwriter, folk, folk-rock, mellow gold, country-rock, prog, roots rock, and hard rock; and "Pop" would refer to all commercial, contemporary, and traditional poppy tunes. In that case, "Indie/Alt," with 178 entries, would just slightly edge out "Rock" at 172, and both would beat out "Pop," 124, for the most recurring in my head. All these statistics are subject to intense scientific scrutiny, naturally.

What follows from the top genres in my head in Aught Nine is the more specific: the musical artists that floated around the grey matter. While twelve out of almost three hundred entries doesn't count as domination, the noble Sloan, four indie rocking lads from Toronto, by way of Nova Scotia, have maintained the lead in crafting the songs that stick in my head most often. What's tragic is that most of my readership has probably never heard them. Magnetic Fields follow Sloan at nine entries so far, and some obscure band calling themselves "The Beatles" are close behind. I included all artists with at least 4 entries a piece, and have discluded the scores of other artists lodged in my brain last year, seeing as how pies can only accommodate so many slices.

The list of top artists all and all makes a whole lot of sense to me, given the internal chemistry of music I know and love combined with music that has enjoyed incessant radio play in my lifetime. Special props to Genesis for being responsible for one of the most annoying songs in my repertoire of earworms, a song that mercifully, has seemed to be less in my head since the start of this blog.

The final chart is sort of a "kitchen sink" of tags that aren't exactly genres, but are interesting enough to me that I like to keep track of 'em. In the tags index, they are listed with genre and referred to as "whatnot."

So, some Whatnot categories are pretty straightforward: lyrics quoted in an entry, songs on which women artists perform, entries about cover versions, songs from TV shows or movies, you get the drift. Some of these categories might need a bit of clarification, so below, please find...

The Glossary to the More Arcane Categories within the "Whatnot" Tag:

Personal History - entries in which I share intimate anecdotes about myself.

Meta - in which a post is self-referential in some way to the blog itself. The entry you're currently reading is a fine example of a post that would be (and will indeed be) labeled with the Meta tag. In fact, the very Glossary you are reading is a further example of meta within meta. It is not, as Dave Eggers might concur, an example of "irony" but of self-indulgent anality, really. The term "meta," when used in the context of the internetwebs, comes from the term "meta tag," an element within html that provides data about the data in a web page. The word "meta" is from the Greek for "beyond" or "with" or "self" and indicates a concept abstracted from and/or complementing another concept. So all this to say, we now know that in 2009, 16 out of 292 blog entries contain self-referential commentary that you may or may not have any interest in whatsoever.

U.S. Bicentennial - posts about songs released in 1976, the 200th anniversary year of our fair nation, and the fourth year of the author's life (the "author" being me). Songs released during this time period, impressionable age as it was for me, tend to engender a special emotional resonance, no matter how schmaltzy, and the era was indeed schmaltzy.

Vicissitudes of Love - in which I wax philosophic about the song as it relates to the push-me-pull-you dilemma we know as le dance de l'amour.

Earworms - apparently someone somewhere has given a name to songs that get stuck in your head. The earworm nomenclature occurred at some point in history before I began blogging about the subject. You can read about them in the blog and elsewhere.

Ren Faire Aesthetic - I have a minor obsession with the overlap in the proverbial Venn diagram between a. those with a fascination with the Medieval through Renaissance periods and b. those who rock or those who listen to rock, particularly of the classic and prog variety. In the form of a question: what confluence of cultural influences produced an album cover like the one to your right?

Songs in my dreams - It is a happy, but thus far, rare, occurrence when a song features in a dream and I get to blog about it.


Thanks, everybody! I hope you'll keep reading, rocking, and Venning with me in 2010!

Peace and Love,
Sooze


~Fin~