763 songs, 1 amazing compilation
Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s on The Morning News proves that Paul Ford is an insane, overcommitted, inspired genius.
It is as it says: as many music files as Paul could drum up from this year's South by Southwest festival, reviewed in exactly six words. (The six-word write-up, if you hadn't heard, is a hot trend right now.)
The writeups are the genuis part.
"Rocks like a dad-bought Camaro."
"Soft pink vagina frosted jazz cupcakes."
"The pinnacle of cock-rock horseshit."
"You can love Neko Case too much."
The insane, inspired, and overcommitted part is, well, the rest of it. Every band he could find, alphabetized, chronicled, linked to two places, reviewed and rated on a 5-star scale. Then, because it's Paul, there are the pull-outs: more than a dozen charts, graphs, summaries and observations. Which makes the chart more palatable and, no doubt, kept the research interesting, too.
I have much work ahead of me just digesting the page. Can barely fathom the work--by one man--that went into it. But then this is the same guy who more or less singlehandedly scanned 150 years of Harper's magazine and cleaned up the OCR for a web archive, so I'm not surprised. Just blinking a lot. Great, great stuff.