Music

My music and music I like.

End of Decade Lists

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 2 Comments

I’ve started to collect data in order to put together lists of my favorite music, movies and books of the decade. And this is the first decade where I have data.

netflixI’ve been a Netflix member for close to 8 years and religiously rate everything I watch. Now thanks to a script I wrote (and has been improved since by others), I can pull the data out of Netflix and analyze. For example, filter the data on all movies where year>1999 and stars=5. There’s my best of the decade, or at least a place for me to start.

itunesI’ve been managing my music in iTunes since 2005, and have been pretty religious about accurate tags and rating tracks. At this point, I can slice up the data with Smart Playlists and scripts in any fashion I like. I have more than 2000 songs from this decade of which about 300 are rated 5-stars. Yeah, I’m liberal with ratings. Also, I like my own collection. So those 300 are where I would start for my list of favorites. Everything from The Marshall Mathers LP to The Hazards of Love. Or from Dhadkan to Delhi-6, for you Bollywood types. In addition to my iTunes playcounts, I have my Last.fm play counts. The Last.fm data is not a complete representation, but it is public.

Here’s a song which will definitely figure in my top 10:

Books are tougher. I haven’t rated or cataloged everything I have read, not even close. And I’ve read many from the library, a few borrowed, a fewer still online. And none of those places have my reading history. The library would keep history if I asked it to, but I asked it not to. And most of the books I read were probably written before 2000, so they wouldn’t be the best of this decade. So I may not have a *list* of my favorites, but a general non-definitive whatever-I-think-of.

*UPDATE*: Of course, I haven’t actually put my list together yet. Coming soon, to a blog near you…

Decade’s Most Important Music

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

So it’s that time of the decade, when we put together best-of lists. NPR Music contributors have put together their list of 50 most important recordings of the past decade. It’s a good-ish list– betraying their indie bias– but as Bob Boilen says:

We make these lists not to exclude certain recordings, but to turn people on to music that we feel stands out the most in an unimaginably crowded field. We also make these lists so you can tell us about the music you are passionate about. […] None of the many people who helped put this list together agreed on all the selections. We all had our favorites and, of course, many never made it into the final 50. Regardless, there’s a ton of amazing music to spend time with, and probably some things you never heard of just waiting to be discovered.

Continue reading →

Tracking Down the Roots of an Elusive Song

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 2 Comments

This is something I do all the time; and I believe a lot of people must find themselves with similar problems, so here goes.

The song in question is “Aaj Unse Pehli Mulaaqat Hogi”:http://www.hindilyrix.com/songs/get_song_Aaj%20Unse%20Pehli%20Mulaqat%20Hogi.html sung by Kishore Kumar, music “RD Burman”:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005983/, lyrics Anand Bakshi, film Paraaya Dhan (1971).

For a while now, I knew that the tune of the line “phir hoga kya, kya pata kya khabar” was copied-from/adapted-from/”inspired-by” some western song. I had heard it in restaurants, ad jingles, english movie trailers- but none of these sources were enough to track down where the tune originally came from. In fact, I have a long list of tunes in my head for which I have been searching for the source for years. For years, I kept my ears open to hear this particular tune again somewhere I can ask someone what song was playing! No luck. Continue reading →