Johnny America

 

So You’re Play­ing G‑Unit Again?

by

Al­right, I can un­der­stand that sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, if my iTunes playlist is set to se­lect songs at ran­dom, then out of my 4676 songs it’s not im­prob­a­ble that at some point any one of a sub­set of say, nine­teen songs, in that playlist might come up back-to-back af­ter an­oth­er song off the same al­bum. But there comes a point at which I must ques­tion the this so-called “shuf­fle” fea­ture’s in­tegri­ty re­gard­ing its se­lec­tion of music.

I am by no means a sta­tis­ti­cian and will not at­tempt to cal­cu­late nu­mer­i­cal odds re­gard­ing the like­li­hood of such an oc­cur­rence — all I can say is that my iTunes com­put­er pro­gram has some­how de­vel­oped a pen­chant for G‑Unit. Ap­ple Tech­ni­cal Sup­port states this is not pos­si­ble — that iTunes does­n’t care what mu­sic I lis­ten to. But it has happened.

Now I don’t mind G‑Unit — in fact, there are a cou­ple of tracks I gen­uine­ly like. 50 Cen­t’s sing-song rhyming styles are usu­al­ly pleas­ant enough for me to han­dle. But out of the past twen­ty-two songs the iTunes shuf­fle mech­a­nism has se­lect­ed, fif­teen have been tracks from the al­bum Beg for Mer­cy. This in­cludes the song “I Smell Pussy,” which I have now heard three times today.

My iTunes has nev­er dis­played a sim­i­lar affin­i­ty be­fore, not even when I first in­tro­duced the now-clas­sic 50 cent mas­ter­piece Get Rich or Die Try­ing (which is clear­ly the su­pe­ri­or al­bum). Maybe this al­bum ap­peals to iTunes’ in­ner thug, but if this were the case, then why G‑unit? There’s plen­ty more rap con­tained in my playlist, work with sig­nif­i­cant­ly more artis­tic mer­it. For now I have to ac­cept this and move on. Maybe iTunes will, as I have, get tired of the clichéd lyri­cal con­tent and unimag­i­na­tive beats, then move on to more pro­gres­sive al­ter­na­tives. Then again, it just played ‘Stunt 101’ again…

Filed under Non-Fiction on February 26th, 2004

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