Metaphysics And Apple’s iTunes Store

It’s kind of cool when you notice
you get one hundred and fifty
hits at the Apple iTunes store
when you search for the song “Misty.”

It’s tempting to believe jazz rules
based on that number of covers
(although not all hits are covers).

But if you look around a bit
you see that exact same number
of hits for the song “Proud Mary”
(again not all hits are covers).

That’s not to say jazz doesn’t rule.

But it is to say, I suspect,
we can’t use Apple’s iTunes store
to sort out our metaphysics.

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“Misty” and “Proud Mary” trivia:


The music for “Misty” was written
by jazz piano player Erroll Garner.

He thought of the song on a plane
and since he couldn’t read or write
music [!] he hummed the tune
to himself until he got home
and could play it on piano to
record or have someone transcribe.



“Proud Mary” was written
by John Fogerty and contains
a famous mondegreen.

The second verse opens with:

Cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis,
Pumped a lot of pain down in New Orleans

Tina Turner sang ‘tane’ instead of ‘pain,’
thinking he meant pumping gasoline,
thinking he said ‘tane,’ slang for ‘octane.’

After her cover, Fogerty himself
would sometimes sing ‘tane.’

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11:00 AM Update


Ooops!

In fact the number “150” means nothing at all at the Apple iTunes store.

That is simply the largest number of results their browser displays at any given time. All popular songs easily get more than 150 hits and fill that first browser page.

There is a little button at the bottom right to display more results when the browser fills up.

That’s embarrassing.

But in the spirit of blogging being spontaneous and all that, I’m going to leave this page up.

A red faced howler.