Q: Why didn’t [your favorite artist] get nominated for Song, Album, or Record of the Year? A: Nominations in the Big Three categories are designed to recognize achievements beyond those of the artist. That’s why none of these awards have the word “artist” in them. Song of the Year, then, is given for the best…
Last week, I posted a ranking of the 100 best Billy Joel songs. In this post, I take a look at the most popular Billy Joel songs according to aggregated listening data from Last.FM and how that compares to my selections.
The story of Austin Chapman provides an awesome basis for discussion. If you haven’t seen this, take two minutes to read it before going on: Being able to hear music for the first time ever. Let me give you a glimpse of the deaf world. With his old hearing aids in, Chapman could hear some…
Every now and then I browse through the archives of Earn This — and my colllege newspaper columns, and my old personal web-site, etc. — and I usually come away some combination of pleased and disgusted. Pleased, in that my writing has become progressively more readable. Disgusted, in that so much of what I’ve written…
Topping the UK charts is as easy as a² + b² = c². The Music Information Retrieval (MIR) team at the University of Bristol recently announced to the world that they had devised a mathematical formula that indicates what qualities of a song are important, and to what degrees, in determining whether that song will…
Tell me if this sounds familiar: Pop/rock group makes a hit, gets unjustly labeled as a “one-hit wonder,” releases a dark and emotional masterpiece that witnesses the band crumbling, breaks up soon afterwards, disappears for years despite some generous re-appraisals of their later work, finally re-appears. Trick question! I described (at least) two bands. Weezer…
I’ve been on a Bruce Springsteen kick recently (I think I could write a two-thousand word analysis on Rosalita alone), but occasionallyI need something more mindless and disposable. My recent pop album of choice has been Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, which has risen considerably in my esteem the past few weeks. It has a lot…
In the past I have praised the Annie Awards for providing a lens into the most important animated features from each year of the past couple decades. The largest mark against the awards came in 2008, when Kung-Fu Panda won Film of the Year against Wall-E, which was by far the most recognized and important…
Welcome to the teens! The aughties have reached their end and all of us who smugly ignored 2000 and celebrated the new millennium as 2001 rolled in are psyched about the new decade. Why? Because a new decade means that it’s prime time for retrospectives on the last decade! So, just in time for the…
The U.S. version of The Office is my favorite show of all time (for a variety of reasons, all of which will be detailed in a post published probably some time around when this season’s finale airs). Yet, until this past week, I had never seen the British original. In the past five days, I’ve…