You are what they eat, they say, in which case I’m mostly caffeine and potatoes.
As for what you listen to, that too has an influence on who you are and, naturally, vice versa. With this in mind it is with some disdain that I find myself plumped among the masses when it comes to my music taste. Yes, I’m a snob. No, it’s YOUR problem.
Whilst I have a fairly wide taste of music, and I continue to try and steer myself away from the mainstream (something that is easier to do these days), I only have to look back at the statistics gathered for me by Last.fm which, based on the 83,000 odd tracks I’ve listened to in the past 4 years or so, suggests that my top 20 most frequently played artists are:
- Foo Fighters
- Radiohead
- Kings of Leon
- R.E.M.
- The White Stripes
- Massive Attack
- Muse
- Pearl Jam
- Elbow
- PJ Harvey
- Eagles of Death Metal
- U2
- Faithless
- Bjork
- Kanye West
- Aimee Mann
- Goldfrapp
- Portishead
- Leftfield
- Neil Finn
Hardly stepping off the beaten track, am I?
But this doesn’t tell the whole story, if you only take my listening habits from the last 3 months then Fleet Foxes, Lemon Jelly and Sigur Ros all make it into the top 10 which certainly feels, to me, a bit more representative of my listening habits.
The real reason I’m listing this here, now, is that (if I remember) I’ll revisit this topic in 6 months or so and see if the Genius button in iTunes has had much of an impact. We’ll see.