Jump for Jurvis

After over 6 months at the top of my favorite Smart Playlist, Mainstream by Outkast has fallen off the chart. This Smart Playlist, called “_last week” so that it’s listed first among my playlists, is very simple. All songs that I’ve listened to in the last week are automatically added to it. If I’ve gone more than a week without listening to it, the song is automatically excised from the list. This means that there was no period of time from last October until last week when I went more than a week without listening to this single song. That may not seem like much in the era of ClearChannel overplaying a handful of schlock for whole seasons, but this one song out of a 60GB iPod (over 7000 mp3s!) remained atop the stack.

_last week means so much to me because it does an interesting thing that you can only get through an iPod interface (the one case where the iTunes interface doesn’t logically surpass the iPod interface). It allows the cream to rise to the top. By that I mean, the song at the top of _last week will always be the song that has spent the most continuous weeks having been played. It’s the kind of feedback cycle that lets you quickly listen to a broad selection of music that has been on repeat in your subconscious. And there’s no field in iTunes you can sort on that will present this cream to you in the same way. So take the plunge and make your own _last week (or _last month etc). Even if you never listen to it, you’ll be surprised to see how quickly it self selects the jams that get you groovin’.