Rediscovering a song (badly).

We all have them. Those old songs that –memory tells you-, at the time, you liked yet you, for the life of you, can’t remember the artist or the title of the song; often you can´t even remember the words.

Here I just want to write down five cases of re-finding a song ranging from ‘easy’ to ‘near impossible’. Maybe it will help some people who are looking for that one song they heard somewhere on springbreak during the 90’s with lyrics that went: “la la la” (2 Eivissa by the way).

Easy peasy.

If you are in a bar or a club often a song comes by that you might not know (yet). There’s a handy app for that called Shazam.

Shazam was a pretty strange event in my social life (even stranger than suddenly having 50+ people on my jogging route looking for Pokemon). There you are, in some bar, slamming down some beers, mustering up the courage to talk to some girl. When, all around you people are holding their phones up to the music speaker.  Shazam really broke down the icebreaker of: “Can you help me? Do you know the title of this song?”

Basically a song is on and instead of waiting for (daddy) deejay to name the artist and title (or ask that one girl) you let Shazam listen to it. Easy as pie, but not good for your social life.

Some hope left.

Sometimes you remember a word or two from the lyrics. That’s perfect because now you can do a google-search. Just enter something like: ´Lyrics "take me” “home” “I´m gone”. I´m sure the first topic that will show up will bring you an Aha-erlebnis.

Common sense, here, is key! I doubt that I listen to a lot of religious music so a lot of those results I can skip. The same goes for rap-music.

Unfortunately the poetic musings of rap music have taken hold in this world. This, because rap-music has a tendency to use ‘all the words around’ making it more likely that the first three search-results are some hip-hopper trying to make a buck. Thus cluttering up the results.

Still, if you use common sense it’ll take you no more than ten minutes to find what you’ve been looking for.

But then…what if you don’t know any of the lyrics?

A little hope left.

Images are powerful things. Images combined with words, however, are a recipe for disaster.

A good example would be ‘Last stop this town’ by the Eels.

I remembered the video: It featured some guy getting cloned in a carrot. In the end the carrot was placed in a wind-up robot and walked away.

Googling: ‘Guy cloned in carrot’. And entering the image tab the first hit is a screenshot of the music video. All the other hits were rappers making a buck.

But it’s not always that easy.

'Daydream in blue’ by I Monster, for instance, is a prime example.

I remembered the video: It featured some gothic-dressed people singing and some dolls. I also remembered a Barbie doll in a dominatrix outfit.

Now, Googling ‘Barbie in leather’ will bring you all kinds of websites you don’t want to see. Trust my word on this…so the context of the video made it harder for me to find the actual song.

Dropping the Barbie-angle made it a whole lot easier for me to re-find the song.

No hope left.

So, Google isn’t always your friend. You can’t blame the search engine but it will always offer the most popular result first. So any recent song/image/video that slightly matches your description will pop up first.

Blame the next generation for this and humanity’s inability to look back at the past.

Now try this description:

A woman, some sort of queen with a crown and everything, is reading a pamphlet to a bum. She chases him and dives (after him) into the canal. Later they dine together in a palace being husband and wife. Oh and the video was in black-and-white.

Naturally, Google will jump at the chance to bring Freddy Mercury centre stage the minute I enter the search-word ‘Queen’.
I mean, I like the man, but he’s not the one I’m looking for.

Second, because this is an old video I have to sort through numerous contemporary videos and pictures that feature some sort of queen and crown.

The black-and-white angle doesn’t work either. The Google-image function that lets you set the search results to black-and-white automatically assumes that you are looking for Madonna going Vogue. Whilst Wikipedia’s list of black-and-white videos only mentions the ‘really important’ videos shot in black-and-white (e.g. Wonder wall or Firestarter).

So this one is, to say the least, a bit of a problem. The music video you are looking for has to be unique enough to make a dent. After all compared to a guy getting ‘cloned into a carrot’ a singing queen is rather mundane.

Not a chance.

To end with sheer insanity. Back in the day I had a disc full of Midi-files. You could buy those things back then, just CD-roms filled with random stuff.

These CD-roms were like treasure-troves, you never knew what you were going to get.

I actually found a marvellous MOD song about peanut butter from one of them; which is as silly as it sounds.

On one of those discs there was a Midi-file named 3535SPEW.mid. No artist no nothing, just some synthesizer song that sounded familiar to me.

How to find a song if don’t know the artist, title, or even if it is man or woman singing (or if the song contains singing at all)?

What I did was to write down the sheet music of the song. There are numerous programs that can convert a Midi-file to sheet music. But –because I wasn’t really thinking ahead- then I still had a problem because there was no search engine to compare it to.

Nowadays, however, we have Musipedia. And lo and behold: it works. You just fire up the flash-piano and get creative.

But, about five years too late for me since I already found it due to sheer luck. One evening I was nostalgically clicking old music videos on Youtube and suddenly I rediscovered it.

The song was Roxette’s ‘Spending my time’ (=SPE) by the way.

From easy to difficult: pop culture can get in the way

So there you have it. What I tried to highlight here is how difficult it becomes to find a song based on the images of the music video if it isn’t popular and/or new.

Luckily MTV’s time of music videos has come to an end –though it does sometimes happen that the channel plays a song or two between teen pregnancy’s- and with the online world now at our fingertips it is far easier to find something you listened to a few weeks ago. A few years, however; not a chance.