Ghostbusting Tunes

While I'm sat plugging away at work, I'll typically listen to a podcast of one description or another (This American Life, Podcastle, Escape Pod and The Dice Tower are some of my favorites). But there are times when even I, slacker that I am, has to concentrate and whilst this will usually cause me to switch on Elmnts for some background noise that I can use to tune out by surroundings, recently I have been exploring the offerings of my Play Music subscription which (like Spotify) allows me to trawl the universe of music for a wide array of options of mind bogglingly bad music. You don't even have to venture far from the beaten track!

For instance, do you like Nirvana? do you also like a number of female vocalists? in that case Grrl Rock Radio is clearly going to be a winning playlist for you!... Now not all of these are terrible... just 99% and in their defence there are a plethora of fascinating and mostly man-hating band, album and song names in the mix to provide some light relief from yet another debugging session and the accompanying bleeding ears. Some of my personal favorites include Phallus Über Alles, Frumpie One Piece and not least Babes in Toyland. Listening to this station just left me thinking of 10 Things I Hate About You and in particular this line from Patrick:

         
                                 CAMERON
                    (continuing)
                    Alright.  Okay -- Likes:  Thai food, feminist 
                    prose, and "angry, girl music of 
                    the indie-rock persuasion".  Here’s a list of
                    CDs that she has in her room.
          
                                 PATRICK
                    So I'm supposed to buy her some noodles and a 
                    book and sit around listening to chicks 
                    who can't play their instruments, right?
          

Next up was 'Eat My Shorts' Radio - hoping for something that would evoke a bit of early Simpsons nostalgia... what I neglected to realise is that Eat My Shorts is in fact a term that was used by more rebellious kids of the 80s as way of saying Eat my shit without getting into trouble I guess and this music is meant to represent what these kids would have listened to... all I can say is that 80s Shorts kids had terrible taste. This is a lot of American post-Sex Pistols, pre-Nirvana angry rock. It exemplifies bad recording quality, bad playing and a general lack of talent.

Finally I went for a music to code to playlist that seemed to largely feature electronic music, never a genre I was a fan of but some of the tunes were decent, and then I started listening to Justice which intrigued me and I followed up checking out a music video of one of the angrier tracks on YouTube... I am not really sure what this was aiming for except possibly just notoriety to increase their brand.

So in the end I went back to my preferred method of listening to Play Music... take a song / album / artist I know I like and start a 'Radio Station' based off of that... It always works. This time one based off of Ok Go's new album - Hungry Ghosts which is fantastic.

A rather mixed musical experience but it kept the week interesting!

On a totally unrelated note, as those who follow me on G+ will already know: I spent the weekend building this:

Oh yeah! That's right, I built my very own Ecto-1! I had wanted to film the whole build but sadly I only have my phone with me here and apparently it only films for a limited time... but for those of you that have too much time on your hands, here is the first 15 minutes of the build - mostly the crew and their plinth.

Let me know what you think!