Life

1. In one of the books I'm reading right now, they frequently make references to another researcher by the name of "Fruhstuck." On a hunch, I looked it up and saw that her name is actually "Frühstück," with umlauts over the u's, which is German for "breakfast." I suppose this is an occupational surname that you wind up with if your ancestors worked at Waffle Haus.
2. In the past I've mentioned Cherry Bullet's "Hands Up", which uses "Für Elise" as part of the song. Today I discovered Twice Dahyun's "Chess," which uses the same song even more directly. Enjoy!
   Watch on YouTube
3. The fact that I didn't get this posted during the Olympics shows how off-task I've been recently, but I've been doing better for the past couple of days, so you get the post now. This year's Games featured an odd intersection of two of my interests: The Olympics and intellectual property law. Several figure skaters had trouble getting clearance to use the music they wanted for their routines. Intellectual property law is a mess anyway, but once you're crossing pretty much every border on earth and involving major international organizations like the IOC and numerous of the world's largest broadcasters and on top of that there's a lot of money on the line, things just get even more bonkers.

Hope you're all doing well!

I was reading this morning's edition of Dan Rather's Substack newsletter, where he was writing about the song "Stand By Me". (Apparently he writes about a song or musician every Sunday.)

Anyway, he mentioned that "Stand By Me" was "numbered among the Recording Industry Association of America’s 25 Songs of the Century." This naturally got me curious: A ranked list of things? That's like catnip to me!

So I went to look for it. Turns out that there's no such things as the RIAA "25 Songs of the Century." What there is is the "Song of the Century" list, produced by the RIAA in conjunction with the NEA and Scholastic Inc. It's a list of 365 songs. So where did Rather get this idea of "25 Songs of the Century"? Because "Stand by Me" is #25 on the list, and the Wikipedia entry for "Songs of the Century" only includes the top 25 songs on the list. Apparently Rather (or, more likely, one of his research assistants) looked at the Wikipedia entry, didn't read the text carefully, and based on the table of songs assumed that it was a list of 25 songs.

If you read the text carefully, not only do you get the correct number of songs. You also start to question the RIAA's methodology for creating the list. According to the entry, "[h]undreds of voters, who included elected officials, people from the music industry and from the media, teachers, and students" were asked to select the songs. These voters were selected by the RIAA (and one is forced to ask "how many students does the RIAA know?"), and of the 1300 voters selected, only 200 responded. Seems kind of sloppy and haphazard.

Then, if you read the list, you see that the voters were rather sloppy and haphazard in their definition of a song: #7 on the list is the entire album of West Side Story, which is not "a song." Altogether there are 18 albums on the list: 11 Broadway shows, 6 jazz albums, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Obviously I don't have a copy of the instructions that the RIAA sent to the voters, but I think we can all agree that (with the exception of Thick as a Brick and possibly a few others) an album is not a song.

Also, just as an aside, I think 2001 (when this survey was conducted) was a bit premature to be choosing the most impactful songs of the 20th century.

All that being said, I think any other such list would be just as subject to being haphazard and subjective, and on skimming over the list I do think it would be an enjoyable and/or interesting list to listen to. Plus, unless you were born on February 29, you can figure out what day of the year you were born on and then look at the complete list and see what song your birthday corresponds to. (Mine is "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy.)