I couldn't help lamenting the fact that the story is much the same as the pop charts. The derivative lightweight poop floats to the top and gets a million clicks while the really interesting and innovative stuff languishes.
I like to think I'm making allowances for the fact that my tastes run to the weird and the extreme but I just wonder how many identical bollocks artists the mainstream wants. I still get fooled every time. There's this flagwaving fucktard who writes country songs that were old in 1957 and I was thinking "Ah specialty audience" but, no, he is a big name in the US apparently.

There's nothing I like better than dashing preconceptions, including my own, and pursuit of the original looked pretty silly when trawling through bands with bland names but awesome delivery.

It's always been the hardest thing about art, be it big A art or whatever, how do you judge? When it comes to functionality and precision, one feels safe. But when it comes to subjective assessment of what makes good art it's a different story.

Given that there's a purpose to every music form, does this mean we should just nod sagely at every turn, and say pretentious things like de gustibus non est dispatandum and caveat emptor, instead of going along with the critics and music historians who select the best and praise the most creative.

I personally think there's a lot of fun to be had from drawing up lists and enthusing in public about your favourite groups. The exclusions and the passages skipped over too quickly give the game away about what you don't much care for. But that's a pretty passive way of saying you don't like someone's songs.

I can only report from my experience. I didn't like the old rock rote by numbers but I did hear Little Brother Trucker (was a mean motherfucker) a couple of times so it was worth the experience.
I've driven trucks and I've sat up and tried to keep a truckie awake on a couple of hours sleep a night and speeding off his nut, so maybe I just got the allusion in White Line Junkie , which is a tour de force lyrically.

And it wasn't all about trucks. Some foreign bands plum liked the name. They used it in odd combinations and then sang about completely different things. No Phantom 309 on their horizon.

Luckily I am interested in all sorts of shit. I used to raid my nana's record collection and have given the crooners one more spin than my contemporaries. This explains my ability to watch Buble and enjoy his effortless old style ability to entertain.

But back to trucks. I don't know why trucks. I'd tried numbers and going through the alphabet but that was a bit too random. And too big. Trucks was down to a sizable exhaustive list. It hadn't occured to me to check out all the Bobs or Bills or Grahams. So I'll stick with something random like vehicles of transportation and commerce. And I thought I'd stick with something I knew something about but didn't have an obsessive interest in.

Yeah, this was a different kind of tooting your own horn. A truckfull of murderers (I'm pretty sure they spelled it that way) was a different proposition: comical and deranged. They had the chops to; if calling yourself a name like that can ever said to be having the chops.
But fun once.

Other truckfuls were more racist and paranoid and I did miss those. Mainly because they hadn't the wherewithal to post songs.

If you like girl bands - there's a good grrrl variety in Binky, Nice Ass, and

Not if you're a top rated MySpace group you don't, you think to the tune of over a million listens of

Dead Poetic

WTF???!!!

and if you prefer to launch zombie attacks on each other, there's other places for that.

I moved over to given names for my sampling but nothing remarkable to relate there; just plenty of good music. I have become more "cranky" as I feel I've done a sufficient field sample not to have to subject myself to all five songs of an artist I'm not into.

If it's borderline I'll stay. I'm usually doing something while I'm listening anyway so no harm done.
But, yeah, if it's something I'd keep turning the dial on, onto something else.

Of course, if you are one of the acts with ten million or more hits, you can always do like Tommy Lee and put noodley instrumentally kind of stuff that is far removed from the band he drums with.

I've been listening to Robs and Bobs and Bills and Johns for some while now and I do have something to impart: there is a whole mainstream buckskin world you got there that we're not even so much as aware of. I've never heard of George Strait or Billy Currington or Brad Paisley. And I'm not even sure what all the other folk round here would make of these guys if they had heard of them; which they haven't.

It seems contrived to me but then so did a Judas Priest album that was being featured on Classic Albums so maybe it's just me. I did get a bit of a laugh out of the song about the kid with the murderous drug addicts parents who is adopted by churchgoing people and, upon arriving and seeing a picture of Jesus, proclaims that he's seen Him before when he was crouching behind the couch. I'm sure it was meant to be a good ol' reality check but it was too dumb in its earnestness to be taken seriously.

Anyway these guys take a number of top spots unless you go onto the Wilfs and Percies. As do the rappers for that matter. I can't tell that there's lots more going on with the guys who are number one than the ones further down.

I found this with Spooky Tooth: the versions of songs on the certified official site didn't leave me that impressed. More an exercise in being able to cross them off my list.
But when I listened to the second most popular Spooky Tooth site, there were these fantastic 60s psychedelic numbers.

Anyway.. for a month or so there I couldn't get a search for 'Lenny'. I'm not sure why. Every time I tried a message came up saying that the error had been reported to their techs but, if so, Lennies were lower down on their list of priorities. I don't know what Mr Kravitz would have had to say about that, but I guess you just put the whole name in if you want his page.