iTunes Genius update

Just asked the Genius to build a playlist around “Billie Jean,” and here the results are a bit better.

In one sense, it just lazily scraped up the small amounts of 1980’s pop I own in order to service my tiny trace amounts of high school nostalgia (mostly The Police, “Tainted Love,” a tiny amount of Phil Collins– not my favorite period of world history or my own life, so there’s not much there). It then fudged a bit with a lot of 1970’s disco (Gloria Gaynor, The Bee Gees, and some other tracks from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack which I do have in full on the computer).

But then it added a strange assortment of more recent electronica, and I can sort of see the purely musical logic behind the choices, rather than the lazy historical one of the other selections.

However, I also question the ordering… “Bille Jean” transitioning into “How Deep Is Your Love” is a fairly weak d.j.’ing move, in my opinion.

As for The Police, I find that I can’t help liking them. Sting is pretentious and uninteresting to me, and that period of world history is one that nauseates me in many ways– but they did have a certain something, for a pop group.

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Next try: let Genius get to work on Isaac Hayes. It gave me a good play list, but a lazy one: it just did the whole urban radio station thing… It’s Kool and the Gang, Earth Wind and Fire, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Booker T. and the MG’s. Do you know what I mean? I was hoping it would find unsuspected resonances between the songs.