19 Jul 2007, ST
An online radio station led me to a 1930s song - taking me to a dark corner of history and giving me a taste of a daydream
By Hong Xinyi, culturevulture
IT ALL began with a letter. I came to work one day, fired up my laptop and typed the web address of Pandora, an online radio station, into my Internet browser.
A friend had clued me in on this lovely site where you can customise your own radio stations.
Type in the name of a song or an artiste and the programme will play music that has similar characteristics, without any annoying DJs or pesky commercials sullying your musical nirvana.
There is a pleasing sense of random chance to the whole process, a sense of interacting not with a database but with a sort of sentient music guru who likes to surprise you with lovely new tunes.
Pandora became my soundtrack at work. On stressful days, I listened to my angry punk station; on days when I felt like wallowing, I turned to my melancholy singer-songwriters station.
The music played as I filed frantic copy and mulled over awkward syntax; it drowned out the functional blips and burps of noise from the photocopier and printer near my desk and gave my days a patina of aural poetry.
AND then, suddenly, on that day in May, it was all over.
Instead of seeing my painstakingly selected music stations when I typed in the website name, I was greeted with an apologetic letter from Pandora founder Tim Westergren.
'Dear Pandora visitor,' the letter began. 'We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the US.'
I was crushed. Immediately, I started frantically trying to remember what songs and artistes I had discovered on Pandora.
I went to HMV that evening to hunt down some of my lost music. That excursion was how I came to own my first Nina Simone CD. I had typed the name of this American chanteuse into Pandora because a character talked about her in the 2004 romance Before Sunset, one of my favourite movies.
I ripped that album into my iTunes and synced it onto my iPod. A few days later, while walking home one evening when the heated air was heavy with moisture, a Nina Simone song started to play on my Shuffle playlist.
'Southern trees bear strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,' that languorous, dangerous voice crooned, an enchantress conjuring phantasmagoric visions.
'Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,' it continued.
What is this, I wondered, as goose pimples started rising on my arms. I checked my iPod screen - the song was Strange Fruit.
I Googled the lyrics, three stanzas that play on the human instinct of being attracted to sensual beauty ('scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh') before twisting your mind's eye towards the horror of lynched African Americans in the American South ('then the sudden smell of burning flesh').
My curiosity piqued, I bought a book from Amazon.com about the song, Strange Fruit: The Biography Of A Song.
It tells the story of how the song, written by Abel Meeropol, was made famous by Billie Holiday in the 1930s, how it became an anthem of sorts for the American civil rights movement and how it is rarely heard today because of its profoundly disturbing imagery.
I LIKE to think of this, the story of how I found Pandora and then lost it, of how it led me down an unexpected path into a dark corner of history, as an adventure in culture made possible by the ease of modern technology.
In a recent column, Salon.com writer Farhad Manjoo waxed lyrical about his new iPhone, writing that 'sometimes technology excels exactly when it eases the banal'.
But what would happen, I wonder, if we demanded more of our technology than just an easing of the banal, if we asked for more than crisp ringtones and sharp images?
What would happen if we asked instead for knowledge, for revelation, for inspiration?
I daydream, some days, of losing myself in a vast country teeming with masses of people, each with his own esoteric passions; of finding context and purpose in the long, mangled histories of others; of being a small part of epic narratives made serpentine by the passage of centuries and the feats and follies of millions.
A taste of that daydream is what technology offers me these days, with devices and services offering increasingly niche items of culture with an increasingly stunning degree of ease.
It's not quite an epic life, I know; but it can unexpectedly, at times, soar far above the banal.
An online radio station led me to a 1930s song - taking me to a dark corner of history and giving me a taste of a daydream
By Hong Xinyi, culturevulture
IT ALL began with a letter. I came to work one day, fired up my laptop and typed the web address of Pandora, an online radio station, into my Internet browser.
A friend had clued me in on this lovely site where you can customise your own radio stations.
Type in the name of a song or an artiste and the programme will play music that has similar characteristics, without any annoying DJs or pesky commercials sullying your musical nirvana.
There is a pleasing sense of random chance to the whole process, a sense of interacting not with a database but with a sort of sentient music guru who likes to surprise you with lovely new tunes.
Pandora became my soundtrack at work. On stressful days, I listened to my angry punk station; on days when I felt like wallowing, I turned to my melancholy singer-songwriters station.
The music played as I filed frantic copy and mulled over awkward syntax; it drowned out the functional blips and burps of noise from the photocopier and printer near my desk and gave my days a patina of aural poetry.
AND then, suddenly, on that day in May, it was all over.
Instead of seeing my painstakingly selected music stations when I typed in the website name, I was greeted with an apologetic letter from Pandora founder Tim Westergren.
'Dear Pandora visitor,' the letter began. 'We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the US.'
I was crushed. Immediately, I started frantically trying to remember what songs and artistes I had discovered on Pandora.
I went to HMV that evening to hunt down some of my lost music. That excursion was how I came to own my first Nina Simone CD. I had typed the name of this American chanteuse into Pandora because a character talked about her in the 2004 romance Before Sunset, one of my favourite movies.
I ripped that album into my iTunes and synced it onto my iPod. A few days later, while walking home one evening when the heated air was heavy with moisture, a Nina Simone song started to play on my Shuffle playlist.
'Southern trees bear strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,' that languorous, dangerous voice crooned, an enchantress conjuring phantasmagoric visions.
'Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,' it continued.
What is this, I wondered, as goose pimples started rising on my arms. I checked my iPod screen - the song was Strange Fruit.
I Googled the lyrics, three stanzas that play on the human instinct of being attracted to sensual beauty ('scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh') before twisting your mind's eye towards the horror of lynched African Americans in the American South ('then the sudden smell of burning flesh').
My curiosity piqued, I bought a book from Amazon.com about the song, Strange Fruit: The Biography Of A Song.
It tells the story of how the song, written by Abel Meeropol, was made famous by Billie Holiday in the 1930s, how it became an anthem of sorts for the American civil rights movement and how it is rarely heard today because of its profoundly disturbing imagery.
I LIKE to think of this, the story of how I found Pandora and then lost it, of how it led me down an unexpected path into a dark corner of history, as an adventure in culture made possible by the ease of modern technology.
In a recent column, Salon.com writer Farhad Manjoo waxed lyrical about his new iPhone, writing that 'sometimes technology excels exactly when it eases the banal'.
But what would happen, I wonder, if we demanded more of our technology than just an easing of the banal, if we asked for more than crisp ringtones and sharp images?
What would happen if we asked instead for knowledge, for revelation, for inspiration?
I daydream, some days, of losing myself in a vast country teeming with masses of people, each with his own esoteric passions; of finding context and purpose in the long, mangled histories of others; of being a small part of epic narratives made serpentine by the passage of centuries and the feats and follies of millions.
A taste of that daydream is what technology offers me these days, with devices and services offering increasingly niche items of culture with an increasingly stunning degree of ease.
It's not quite an epic life, I know; but it can unexpectedly, at times, soar far above the banal.
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