Make magic happen: Shazam!
The internet has magic powers. It can bring you all manner of worldly delights: books, music, film. And there’s a sea of sheer content out there that comes when you call it, if only you can speak its name. I’ve found a fair number of songs I was looking for by googling a fragment of half-remembered lyric, but how do you type in a melody?
I got an iPhone because Matt wanted the 4G and he got me one, too, because he’s a sweetheart and also because he sensed I’d bogart his (…which is why he bought me my DSi, actually). But the real reason I wanted one? Was because of Shazam!
My friend Mackenzie had it on her 3G, and it could pick out the invisible notes floating in the air like soap bubbles and then ask the sky what the name of the song was. For some reason, I was perfectly accepting of technology that can track you anywhere people can triangulate cell phone towers, but the idea that it could recognize music kind of blew my mind.
With Shazam, I found out the name of this track that I heard at The People’s Pub while eating wienerschnitzel was called “Ketto”, by Bonobo. I want to make it my themesong for the HBO series that they’ll base on the terrible book I’m writing about a sullen little bad-ass scientist who likes to kick werewolves in the face; give it a listen:
The first song I ever Shazammed was a weirdly peppy little ditty called “The Hanging Tree” by Marty Robbins. I was so gobsmacked by the freaky lyrics that I just had to know what it was. The app downloaded before the song was over, and the rest is history:
Shazam has fetched me songs I’d never have been able find otherwise, like this dreamy glide by Flying Lotus:
And Gilberto Gil’s live version of Oia eu aqi de novo, a groove so infectious that an entire dinner crowd was chair dancing and head-bobbing in line because everyone had to bounce to this tune:
Seriously, Shazam is the best app ever invented: it’ll tell you the song, and of course offer to sell it to you for a mere 99 tiny cents. Then it will sip the very ether until that song is a neatly spun filament of aural candy coiled in your iPhone and ready to twirl into your delighted Eustachian tubes.
You’ll find there’s a whole world out there to listen to.
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
I know, right? Shazam beats my old song title discovery method (trying to memorize a snippet of lyrics and then typing them into a search engine hours later) by a country mile.
Also, in like 1989 I once telephoned a radio DJ because the station kept playing this song I loved and I had no idea who it was or what it was called (turned out to be “Anything, Anything” by Dramarama, for the record). Living in the future is awesome!
While living in the future is awesome, calling a radio station and talking to the DJ and asking, “What was the name of that song about the woman who hit a deer with her car?” and then they tell you that it’s Neko Case, “Favorite” from The Tigers Have Spoken.