Exploring the possibilities of the music tracking website

There’s a sense of mystery surrounding one’s musical habits. Sure, you know more or less what genres and albums you’ve been loving lately, but the actual statistics often prompt some sobering realizations. Even with the stats, I can hardly believe that I: a) have listened to “Pure Heroine” by Lorde 60 times in the last seven days and b) have heard a cumilitive three hours of “Cyber Sex” by Doja Cat. For some, these numbers are too frightening, but for many, the ability to look is too good to refuse — and that is where music tracking website Last.fm comes in.

The site can be paired with all common music streaming services to track your scrobbles. Scrobbles — song listens that are tracked and logged — are displayed by the site in your charts, where you can see your top artist, album and song for various amounts of time. Your scrobbles are analyzed to tell you how many new artists you are discovering and what time of day you listen most. Last.fm is free, but for $3 per month you get access to monthly and yearly listening reports and early access to new features.

Last.fm was popular in the early 2010s, but it quickly lost popularity in 2014 when tracking-based music recommendations became more common. The personalized playlists that made the site unique became obsolete. 

The second feature it boasted was the ability to connect like-minded listeners, but because of the confusing web interface and lack of individuality, it never developed into the social network it wanted to be. Users still have the ability to check out what friends are listening to, but it’s not a likely place to meet people to talk to about your favorite band. Last.fm creates a profile for your music. It’s a place for you to look back and review your own listening habits while letting you listen without fear of judgement.

The greatest feature of Last.fm is the ability it has given its users to access their own data. Developers have thought of new ways to take your scrobbles and categorize and visualize them. All you do is type in your Last.fm username and the tools sort your listening habits. Because of how outdated the site is, many interesting add-ons have been taken down. For the time being, these six are still up and running:

Last Wave  

This site graphs your listening history in a beautiful and interesting way. The graphs display your music in waves, where the thickness of each line represents the amount you have listened to that artist/song/album. You can customize the colors and size of the graph, and it is easily downloadable and shareable.

Last.fm Collage Generator

This is the site’s most popular tool. The generator creates a 3×3, 4×4, or 5×5 collage based on your Last.fm charts. You can customize the image based on album, artist and playcount. The visual of all the album covers is eye-catching and frequently shared on social media. 

nicholast.fm

If you were wondering what you were scrobbling last summer, this tool can tell you which songs you played and how many times you played them. It lets you look back on your monthly and yearly scrobbles while also displaying how many unique tracks you listened to and your average song repetition. This tool is eye-opening: I learned that I listened to one song from the “Freaky Friday” soundtrack 54 times in June 2019, so I have been re-evaluating my relationship with music.

Last.fm Mainstream Calculator 

This program compares your scrobbles to other listeners’ on Last.fm to calculate an overall “mainstream percentage.” After reading your data, you get assigned a title based on how mainstream you are (I was lovingly labeled “cool”). Other than being really accurate, it’s fun to see how common your tastes are compared to others. It also has the added bonus of seeing your friends’ mainstream percentages.

Explr.fm

Explr.fm is an interactive mapping tool that shows which countries from which you’ve scrobbled artists. You can look further by clicking on the country which will tell you the artists born there and how many scrobbles in total you have heard from that country. It is a bit buggy and sometimes assigns artists to the wrong country, but overall it’s really interesting. You can also check out where your friends are listening from.

Last.fm to csv

For people who are really hungry for data, this tool fetches data from the Last.fm API, and transforms it into a CSV document. Basically, it lets you see every song you have listened to along with the exact day and time you heard it in one big text file. I don’t necessarily understand what to do with it, but it’s cool to see that I was listening to “Call Me Maybe” at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday. Plus saying CSV makes me feel like a hacker.

Because the site only tracks from the moment you sign up, if you didn’t previously have a Last.fm account, you will not be able to see an accurate display of your data. Now that you know about it, go sign up! The longer you’ve had your account, the more interesting your graphs will be. It’s slow catching up in the beginning, but after a few weeks you will be obsessed!

Written by: Livvy Mullen — arts@theaggie.org

Like something out of a warehouse in early 2000s East Berlin.

Do you remember the first time you heard something that would change everything? One can only imagine the sensation of Beatlemania, of experiencing Woodstock, of living in the Bronx during the rise of hip-hop. There is a palpable sense of weight, of a heftiness that underscores its cultural relevance. I was lucky enough to experience one such moment of significance during an outdoor Radiohead show; when the rain began to fall during “True Love Waits,” I proceeded to cry like a big Jewish baby. Another came during a Mild High Club show on Halloween, when a costume-filled dancefloor erupted into chaos after the band covered Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.”

My most recent life-changing listen came when I left my house for my daily government-sanctioned walk a few weeks back. A friend was blowing up our group chat, one that was usually reserved for article sharing and illegal streams of hard-to-find ’80s anime. He sent a link which led to a song called “money machine” by 100 gecs. Almost immediately, I was floored.

The irony of these impactful musical moments, ones that carry this weight to them, are that they give an incredible sense of lightness to the listener. In the case of 100 gecs, it feels as if walls are being torn down, as if the ball has finally unhinged from its chain. “money machine” begins with what sounds almost like a country-inspired guitar riff, albeit deep-fried and processed, sitting next to the opening lyrics of “hey, you little piss baby/you think you’re so f-cking cool?/you think you’re so f-cking tough?/you talk a lot of big game for someone with such a small truck!”

And this is when the beat drops. The track sounds as if it’s becoming rapidly infected, with an array of industrial snares and basslines, ones that speed up as the vocal delivery does. After about a minute and forty seconds, the track creeps into darkness, maligning itself with screamo elements before ending abruptly. 

But the most insane part? It is perhaps one of the most danceable tracks I have heard in a long, long time. The chorus of “feel so clean/like a money machine” genuinely makes you want to bust a move, and not one that would propel you to the top of TikTok either. Indeed, this is part of the charm of 100 gecs and a factor in their musical clout. It feels like they are everything an act in the algorithm age isn’t: honest, natural and most of all, barely marketable. 

There are no studio executives sitting around a table in Hollywood, drinking Icelandic glacier water, already late to a cryotherapy appointment, bickering about how to get these guys on Spotify’s Hot New Finds playlist. The sonic elements, as well the 100 gecs’s nomenclature, defy this wholeheartedly. I mean, can you imagine trying to pitch a track called “xXXi_wud_nvrstop_UXXx” to a board room at Universal? It is refreshing to see a band stay this true to their vision. 

After “money machine,” I decided to queue “1000 gecs,” the band’s debut album. I was rattled by one track, but an entire collection of them had me absolutely shook. “800 db cloud” begins with a beautifully tender vocal-piano combo and quickly accelerates to a pace that features elements of hardcore, drum ‘n’ bass and the most electrifying, pure punk guitar riffs and distorted vocals. It sounds as if a demon possessed the last quarter of the track, as if those warnings of playing albums backward for fear of conjuring Satan were actually true. Again, the vision of 100 gecs is so unique and so clear, it is undeniably exciting and enticing.

 My personal favorite, “hand crushed by a mallet,” opens sounding like something out of a warehouse in early 2000s East Berlin. A rapid eurobeat is jolted awake by autotuned vocals, infused with a bit of dancehall as it goes on, and finally, an exceptional bassdrop that is incredibly danceable. The last line of the track, fittingly, is “if I wasn’t me/I’d copy me, too.” 

As the album goes on, you begin to understand more and more of the vision that Laura Les and Dylan Brady, the duo behind the project, are crafting. All they really want to do is have fun with music, to create sonic landscapes that they would enjoy playing around in. The only instrument I play is kazoo, but I’ve been lucky enough to sit in on bands practicing and warming up. They too, like to have fun with their output. The track “I Need Help Immediately” is a testament to this. 

This is the most interesting track I have come across in a very long time, sonically speaking. Not because I jam out to it or because I’ll never skip it, but because it made me take pause. “I Need Help Immediately” is a smorgasbord of various musical stylings, a vignette of different sounds and effects that lasts almost a minute and a half. It sounds like playing around on a casio keyboard or a pirated copy of Ableton. It is, in so many ways, the sounds of “the process.” It is completely okay if you don’t like it, or if it doesn’t scratch the dopamine receptors in your brain. Because it is exactly the sound of trying to get to that place — something every musician has to tackle at the beginning of a piece. 

100 gecs are blowing up, with pop juggernaut Charli XCX and alt darling Kero Kero Bonito hopping on a remix of their track “ringtone.” They are moving fast, and that’s awesome. They deserve it. With the recognition they get, the more that cultural weight mentioned earlier grows. But I am begging that the hype machine, the countless algorithms and vast corporate interests don’t take away from the most interesting musical act of the decade so far, just to market some form of “anti-pop” or “alternative lifestyle music.” Please. Just let the listeners have this. 

Brady and Les feel as if they are cultivating an era of intersectionality through their music, through their blurring of genre, their world building and their rejection of anything but their own vision. (Which includes always having fun in the booth.) They usher a renaissance in the world of pop that must be noticed — lest you fall to the cultural wayside for ignoring them. They will be no doubt ones to watch. In many ways, the logical conclusion of pop music could very much sound like 100 gecs. 

Written By: Ilya Shrayber — arts@theaggie.org

Historic moments of political upheaval, social unrest marked by era-defining music 

Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys debuted her new song “Good Job” during a CNN virtual town hall on April 24. Originally written for the personal heroes in her own life, Keys rebranded the song as an ode to the first responders and others who stepped up during the fight against COVID-19.

“A lot of times people don’t feel like they’re doing a good job,” Keys said in an interview with CNN. “They feel underwater and like there’s never going to be a brighter day. Fast forward to now, with where we are now, and it’s almost like the song was written for this and I didn’t know it.”

Connecting to music during an uncertain and tumultuous time in history is not uncommon. Historians have referred to nursery rhymes of different time periods to better understand what was occurring culturally and politically. 

Artists look to what is going on around them as inspiration for their music, creating a piece of art that resonates deeply with people and becomes a reflection of the world at large. Whether it be an inspiring ballad expressing gratitude for the common hero, as in Keys’ song, or detailing political criticism such as U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” songs about what the world is going through at a specific time speak to us. 

The following is a list of contemporary songs that perfectly reflected, criticized or changed the world. 

“Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones (1969)

Although the song was initially inspired by people seeking refuge during a rainstorm, it is often remembered as a reflection of the social and political unrest of the time. Released in 1969 as the intro track to their album “Let It Bleed,” the song came to be known for its association with the Vietnam War and the tension in the world.The song’s legacy shows how people find meaning in music that is relevant to them, even if that is not the original intention of the music. 

“Well, it’s a very rough, very violent era,” Mick Jagger said about the album in an interview with Rolling Stone. “And Vietnam was not a war as we knew it in the conventional sense… it was a real nasty war, and people didn’t like it. People objected, and people didn’t want to fight it. [Gimme Shelter is] a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It’s apocalypse; the whole record’s like that.”

“American Idiot” by Green Day (2004)

This title track of Green Day’s seventh studio album is one of the most popular songs from the politically vocal band. The song is heavily critical of news coverage during the Iraq War —  condemning media outlets for imbuing paranoia and thus creating the “American Idiot,” with America as “one nation controlled by the media” that cannot think for itself. 

Despite its divisive message, “American Idiot” was praised by critics for its powerful critique of the media and coveted by the band’s young, equally frustrated and rebellious fans. The song was the band’s first on the Billboard 100 charts and it received a Grammy Award nomination.  

“I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy (1972)

In 1975, the United Nations announced the first “International Women’s Year,” with “I Am Woman” as the anthem of the year. Opening with the line, “I am woman, hear me roar / in numbers too big to ignore,” the song is reflective of the massive strides taken in the fight for women’s rights throughout the 1970s. 

As second-wave feminism emerged, there were more people fighting for women’s rights, emphasizing workplace equality and reproductive rights. The song’s message aligns with what was going on at the time and was a powerful anthem for women everywhere.

“I want to thank God because She makes everything possible,” said Reddy in her acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards for Best Female Performance. Reddy was ahead of her time in many ways, but her actions proved to be just as inspirational as controversial. 

“A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke (1964)

 This 1964 song was inspired, in part, by the time Cooke was turned away from a Whites-only motel. Despite the mildly eerie tone, the song became a ballad for the African American community during the Civil Rights movement. The line “There’ve been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long / But now I think I’m able to carry on” reflects the uncertain hopefulness that equality would one day come.

The song was recognized by the Library of Congress for its importance. It is ranked as number 12 on the Rolling Stones Top 500 Greatest Songs of all time. The message of endurance and effecting true change in the world is as relevant today as it was in the ’60s. 

“It’s been a long time coming,” said President Barack Obama in his speech after winning the 2016 presidential election. “But tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

“Fight the Power” by Public Enemy (1989)

Public Enemy wrote this song at the request of film director Spike Lee, who needed a song for his film “Do the Right Thing” about racial tension in New York. And the song reflects this theme. Released in 1989, the song resonated with the injustices racial minorities face every day.

“The song broke at a crucial period in America’s struggle with race,” wrote Laura K. Warrell for Salon. “‘Fight’ demanded action… Every kid in America, white, black or brown, could connect to the song’s uncompromising cultural critique, its invigoratingly danceable sound and its rallying call.”

The song is often referred to as one of the most important rap songs ever, winning accolades including a spot on the “Songs of the Century” list compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.  

“Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” by Alan Jackson (2002)

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, many songs about the unrest the country was feeling were released — songs that even changed country music itself. Alan Jackson emerged as one of the most popular artists of the time, in part due to this song. He received his first Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 2002. 

“I didn’t want to write a patriotic song,” Jackson said in an interview with a Christian magazine. “And I didn’t want it to be vengeful, either. But I didn’t want to forget about how I felt and how I knew other people felt that day.”

“Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday (1954)

Originally published as a poem by Jewish-American writer Abel Meeropol in 1937, this song is a haunting ballad about the lynchings of African Americans. Holiday’s voice is powerful and mystical as she sings about the “Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” 

Jazz writer Leonard Feather described it as “the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism” in an article for the New York Times. 

The song was also added to the National Recording Registry in 2003. It serves as a powerful reminder of the atrocities that occured in our country’s past. “Strange Fruit” serves as an evocative memory of an appalling time. Holiday’s voice and the eerie musical composition takes the listener to that time and forces them to live in that moment, which is why this song is so important. 

This list only includes music that is relevant to the U.S., but musicians in every country and of every culture reflect on the state of current political and social affairs when creating their art. 

Written by: Alyssa Ilsley — arts@theaggie.org

Underlying implications of fads, changes over generations

As a materialistic nation, embedded in American culture is a want for what we don’t have. Fads come and go, but their existence embodies memories of the past, specifically our childhood. Seeing that the majority of current undergraduate students are Generation Z, these post-millennials experience an “inside joke” relationship surrounding fads that left as fast as these fads came. 

In retrospect, toys and trends that were to die for during adolescence now remain distant memories of the past. These fads, however, shaped the childhood of many individuals. Silly Bandz, Heelys, Webkinz and Tech Decks were some of the many trends that have bonded Generation Z on a level that no other generation could fully understand. 

“[Fads] brought people closer together,” said Kyle Cronin, a first-year ecological management restoration major. “Those that didn’t have much in common now had something in common. It was a big way of keeping friends and making friends.” 

 Every generation has distinct fads from their childhood that render a unique jargon of what was considered “cool” at the time. Of course, if Jimmy or Suzy had the latest and greatest, then everyone else had to have it too — or so we thought for the time being. These trivial items united individuals, while simultaneously isolating others. 

As a result of materialism, economic hierarchy is a necessary part of the conversation. Keeping up with consumerism is inherently pricey. Devon Meyer, a second-year political science major, was perplexed thinking back to the amount of money her parents must have spent on these fads that she would “never touch again.” 

While those who could afford to invest in the materialistic nature of fads swam in their clout and popularity in juvenescence, those who did not have the means to partake in the trends were marginalized. 

“Those that didn’t have [Vine], are kind of left out even today,” Cronin said. 

Not only were they isolated when the fad was considered “cool,” but they are also isolated from the experience of these inconsequential trends that we look back on and bond over today. Financial means, however, are not the only way in which fads divided individuals. 

“Heelys made me feel left out because my mom would never let me get them,” Cronin admitted. 

The empty feeling of lacking the experience of the “coolest” trend of the time is now referred to as “FOMO” or fear of missing out. Fads engrave a deep desire to be “cool” and to fit in with the crowd from a young age. 

“[Fads] really laid the groundwork for a lot of us to seek validation and approval from others, external from ourselves,” said Ethan Wellerstein, a second-year international relations, philosophy and Spanish triple major. 

The dopamine rush of engaging in consumerist values have “conditioned” individuals to “seek external validation” by the means of following the latest trends. As the generation to witness the rapid evolution of technology, Generation Z was arguably the last age group to undergo non-technological dominant fads in childhood. 

“We had a good number of physical [fads] that were tangible,” Wellerstein said. “Our [fads] weren’t solely digital.” 

Comparing Pokémon cards to Fortnite, for example, the players are required to interact with other people for the game to work. Rather than isolating oneself to a screen, Pokémon cards require face-to-face socialization, which is lacking in many modern fads. The new form of socializing is formatted by computer-mediated communication through the means of a device. 

Fads in contemporary times are still “trying to make us look better [by] following whatever everyone else is doing,” according to Meyer. Now, however, they are digitized to showcase to the entire world, not just your friends on the playground. 

“For some reason I felt so compelled to buy [Silly Bandz], to have a rainbow fruit loop collection of rubber bands going up my arms,” Meyer said. Now, you need to have “at least over 1,000 followers” to be considered relevant in the digitized world we live in. 

In their childhood, Generation Z would become aware of the latest trends by word of mouth or advertisements on such popular television channels as Disney or Nickelodeon. Now, with on-demand streaming at our fingertips, these advertisements are minimal. Instead, social media advertisements target individual interests by monitoring online activity. 

Fads still come and go in an endless cycle of consumeristic attraction to materialistic trends, whether they’re tangible or digital. Inevitably, fads create hierarchies, defining individuals by their material possession and knowledge of popular culture. Although controversial in the morals embedded in the meaning of fads, they do play a significant role in childhood — and create a good laugh looking back at old pictures when a few rubber bands would make or break your popularity. 

Written by: Sierra Jimenez — arts@theaggie.org