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musical chairs

The Horn Bearer, Part 2

Apple music has an automatically generated playlist called For You that (from what we can understand by using it) is based on two things:

  • Artists whose music you’ve added to your library
  • Artists you’ve listened to as a result of search or some other non-Apple-curated function

Interestingly, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve ever listened to the music by those artists. If you add an album to listen to later, but never actually play it, this album will figure into your For You playlist at least until you remove it.

More interestingly, it doesn’t matter whether the digital entity it adds to your playlist is a song.

In my case, For You included a track called The Horn Bearer Part 2.

Melvins released the cd and digital editions of their album “The Maggot” with all songs split into two tracks.  And playing the album in entirety, it sounds continuous, and the listener hears the entire songs as intended.

Apple put a song by them from that album that I like very much – The Horn Bearer – into my playlist. But they didn’t put the whole song in.

Just the fragment called “Track 12 The Horn Bearer Part 2.”

That’s not a song, but Apple Music would never know the difference. But to the listener it’s a song that starts in the middle. An error. A glitch.

By design, because the customer is not me, and the purpose isn’t listening. The purpose is encouraging consumption, and the customer is the catalog provider and Apple.

By Marx Marvelous

“When I decided to take an alias, I wanted more than to apply a crust to the worn surface of my real identity. I wanted to make a statement, to express something through the unexploited medium of nom de plume. Being in a defiant frame of mind, I asked myself what it is that my fellows at the Institute—that, indeed, the average American males of my age and economic stratum—hate most. What do they most loathe? The answer I arrived at was Communism and homosexuality. Communists and homosexuals are the targets of the majority of the normal male's fear-honed barbs. Thus you can see how I in my rebellion selected the given name of 'Marx.' The surname was more difficult. Obviously, I couldn't call myself Marx Homosexual or Marx Queer or even Marx Fag. But I remembered having read in a syndicated newspaper column that the one word no red-blooded he-man would ever ever utter was 'marvelous.' 'Marvelous' is an expression reserved for interior decorators and choreographers and is as taboo in the bleachers, the sales meeting or the pool hall as a rose behind the ear or a velvet snood. “So, I embraced that maligned term as if it were a victimized ancestor. And here I am: Marx Marvelous.”