Yet Another Musical Assemblage, and ruminations.

So today, I'm checking out this new music server doodad Musicovery, from a Reddit link, and it's interesting, with a map-like interface and some fairly astute editorializing going on afaict re: the placement of an unfortunately still very limited assortment of music on the map, and I noticed one thing in particular.

I'm kind of a big Robyn Hitchcock fan, and the last time I got to see him a few times in a row, at SXSW before last, one of the regular items in his onstage spiel was to point out the cover he was doing (actually he had a whole album of Dylan covers just out at the time, which is highly recommendable)of Visions of Johanna as being of a song that happened to be his favorite song, and in fact, the reason why he began writing songs.

So, again, at this Musicovery site, with the map: there's a two dimensional interface that you pick a point on with parameters "Dark" and "Positive" on one axis, and "Energetic" and "Calm" on the other.

And right smack in the middle of all four axes, with all the decades available? (That's another parameter I forgot, you can isolate periods on a timeline between about the 40's or so and the present day. ) None other than Visions of Johanna. Got me to thinking... really, it's not a bad call. I assume since this isn't really a folksanomie type of site, it was somebody's arbitrary editorial decision to place the song there... or is it automated somehow, it's an AWFULLY complicated map. Anyway, and either way, I just thought it was kind of nifty. And for a short piece of western popular music, I have to agree with someone, or some aggregate or ai, or whoever did put that there, it's as good an approximation of the Tao as I could think of, too.