Saturday, 11/20/04

I learned today, via Malcolm Gladwell's latest, that "Smells Like Teen Spirit"'s main guitar riff is only a minor modification of the one used by Boston in "More Than A Feeling". I had to listen to both songs before I'd believe it. The iTunes Music Store's 30-second samples thankfully met my Boston needs.

The rest of the article is about par for Gladwell, whose M.O. consists of appraising an aspect of modern conventional wisdom as if it were a seventeenth-century treatise on spontaneous generation of flies from rotting meat. There is no periodical writer whose work I look forward to more, and I can't recall ever having been disappointed.

Via boingboing, I noticed a recording of a half-hour talk Gladwell gave at Pop!Tech on the limitations of people to know and express their own opinions. I was listening to it on the iPod as I took a walk in search of a good sourdough loaf, and when he got to the anecdote about the college students' poster preferences, I admit I shouted in the street. 08:32PM «

Bits pushed by Movable Type