Fantasy Band Meme
Category: Memes...
Posted Wednesday, January 09, 2008 at 06:33 AM [GMT-6]

Via the estimable proprietor of Dustbury.com comes this meme of wondrous frivolity: Build your own band, album, and album cover, using the vast resources of the interweb...chosen at random, that is.

Here are the steps:

• Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
  The first article title on the page is the name of your band.


• Visit http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
  The last four words of the last quote on the page is the title of your album.


• Visit http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
  The third picture on the page is your album cover.

I rigorously followed these steps (ignoring Charles's wimpy ethical concerns about minor details such as copyright), and proudly present the Gazette's latest contribution to the wonderful world of DRM-free music (rather loosely defined, I'm sure):

For the record (ha!), my random Wikipedia article was about Dana Hanna, a software developer in Maryland (what are the odds that my fictitious artist would be a real person?); my album title – which I've managed to make almost entirely illegible – comes from Evan Esar: Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.; and the cover art comes from a photo entitled "Laughter from the Sidelines."

This is actually a lot of fun, with the added benefit of providing a creative challenge in coming up with a halfway decent album cover.

However, never being content to leave well enough alone, I propose to expand this meme by one step: the selection of your fake album's debut position on Billboard's Top 100 list. You may accomplish this by visiting http://www.random.org/integers/ and generating a random number between 1 and 100 (inclusive). Veneer Over Today's Disappointment debuted at a respectable-but-not-flashy number 65. Whether it has a bullet or not remains unknown.

I actually twisted off for a time and worked out a scheme for generating a genre for the made-up band. (Yes, I apparently have too much time on my hands.) This involved visiting the afore-linked random number generator and applying the results to http://www.wfmu.org/genrefinder.php in order to select a genre. That proved to be overly unwieldy, although the results for my band – Power Violence ("Order and disorder in a freeform haze of terribly played guitars, shorted-out electronics, found audio detritus, strange sounds from strange lands all around.") were amusing.