The SXSW music festival can be a daunting event to attend, with thousands of bands all vying for your attention at the same time. The same can be said for the free, 763-song zip file that can be downloaded using a Bittorrent client. Who has time to listen to them all?
Paul Ford of The Morning News did. Painstakingly working his way through every track, the stalwart reviewer listened to every single last track. Luckily for him (and us), he used precisely six words for each review.
Examples:
"''Lime in the coconut' for 2008"
"Girl chirps about snow, suicide, MySpace."
"Answers the question: can Norwegians rap?"
"Merciless gloop; the title is accurate."
"He sings like he has hemorrhoids."
"This song could date my sister."
"I'd have gotten this from Oink."
Ford also assigned each song a rating from one to five circles. Only72 bands out of the lot won five-circle reviews, while 254 received thelowest designation of one circle.
As if this weren't enough, he also peppered the list withfactoids, including the most commonly-found words in the names of bands atthis year's SXSW (ghost, fish, gold, animal, society, sound, black, andbear), and whether more bands came from California or New York(California wins, 276 to 248).
Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW MP3s
The next step is for someone to assemble the 72 songs that received the highest rating into another torrent file. What are you doing on Saturday?
(image of paul ford from facebook)
