Playlist for the Supercilious

I know some music elitists think that I only listen to the songs I posted before, so I’ve posted a 100% variant playlist of songs which I also listen to frequently, thereby augmenting (hopefully) the variety of music which everyone thinks I listen to.

• Tan Dun: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Tan Dun & Yo-Yo Ma)
• Bon Voyage (Fantastic Plastic Machine)
• First Class ‘77 (Fantastic Plastic Machine)
• Techno Syndrome [Mortal Combat] (The Immortals)
• Still Alive (GLaDOS & Jonathan Coulton)
• Son of a Preacher Man (Dusty Springfield)
• Sister Golden Hair (America)
• Norwegian Wood [This Bird Has Flown] (The Beatles)
• Nightingale (Norah Jones)
• Paris (Yael Naïm)
• Conquest (The White Stripes)

“Paris” is a particularly interesting song. It’s by the same artist that you may remember singing “New Soul” from the original MacBook Air commercials (where they pull the laptop from the manilla envelope). The song is mixed English/Hebrew.

“Still Alive” is also a fun song that many people know from Portal, with some classic lines like:

• Aperture Science: we do what we must, because… we can.  For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead.
• There’s no sense crying over every mistake; you just keep on trying, till you run out of cake.  And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun for the people who are still alive. And,
• Maybe you’ll find someone else to help you… maybe Black Mesa!  That was a joke – ha ha – fat chance.  Anyway, this cake is great; it’s delicious, and moist!

The song is sung by GLaDOS, the artificial intelligence from Valve’s Portal.  It gave me a neat idea, too, to write a little program that can make several text-to-speech engines “sing” in unison.  More on that later.