Kill Your Television?

In 1991 for about 2 months 27 days 9 hours and 11 minutes Ned’s Atomic Dustbin were the biggest band in my world. I just loved the sound of how their dual basses played off each other and they had the whole moshing and crowd surfing scene nailed which was exactly what I was looking for.

But that’s not what this post is really about.

I sometimes listen to their albums to reminisce, mostly it’s not that good, I mean it was great for a 13 year old pop kid, but these days I mainly skip through to their anthems – their classic songs I was so into that listening to them again can really take me back there. Not necessarily their most commercially successful stuff, though usually those two do tend to end up hand-in-hand.

So I started thinking about band anthems – as in a song that defines a band. Take Ned’s Atomic Dustbin for example, well I’m pretty sure that most people would have Kill Your Television as their most celebrated song which makes sense, though I actually think their song Happy better defines their sound as a whole. But then I also have an affinity to Grey Cell Green – there’s something about the rhythm and the tone that I find very endearing and would happily put it forward to represent classic Ned’s.

And that’s just one band that existed for a handful of years in the early nineties. What about a band like The Cure who’ve successfully eased through several decades? Some might say the song that most defines them is Boys Don’t Cry, which would be a fair assessment, but the band progressively adapted their sound throughout the years so maybe we need to also consider defining a bands anthems also by genre. Boys Don’t Cry could define them during their Post-Punk phase, Close To Me during the New Wave phase, and Just Like Heaven when they moved into Alternative Rock. I think when it comes to The Cure, Just Like Heaven would be a clear overall winner, but it’s obvious that if a band has had a long and diverse career simply allowing to vote on an overall song might not due them justice.

And then there’s even specific recordings of songs. For example I’m sure that no one would argue against Love Will Tear Us Apart being the definitive anthem for Joy Division, but I would even go as far as to specifically pick the live version on their BBC Recordings as being the definitive version of that song captured on tape.

So I think it would be interesting to try and capture all this kind of data. I’ve looked around and can’t find anything like it, so I might go ahead and take a stab, just a simple anthem database. Allow the public to vote on the song that they most think represents a band. I can already see how it works – pretty simple interface so you can find bands by searching for their name/album/song or paginate through their genre. You can vote, comment, or simply just see who’s winning and why. And obviously you can do as much of it that makes sense through Twitter (Julien’s written another great post that’s inspired me to get back on that Twitter gravy-train).

I think if there’s an API out there that I can easily tap into, which it seems there is with Last.fm API then I should be able to throw something together pretty quick. It appears to have all the queries I need so it’s more down to the hourly limitations, which I haven’t been able to find any documentation that speaks to it (I don’t know if that’s good or bad).

So I’ve been thinking about starting Pixels from the Edge Labs for some time now and this looks like it could well be my first project. You heard it first here!