Yesterday I attended a LAN party some of the youth group kids from church were holding. They planned to play Starcraft, a famous real-time-strategy game (Zerg Rush!). Now if you’ve spent any significant time around me you’ll know I suck at RTS games. The only RTS I actually enjoyed was Total Annihilation.
So I attended, but not to play, but to spend time hacking on some stuff I wanted to.
Pity there was no internet access.
So instead, I started playing some tunes from my laptop. I have a very esoteric music collection, so I started playing some music on my headphones.
But then I thought that hey, I know one of the guys here liked some tracks that I gave him a while back, so I hooked up some speakers that were laying around and, I started out playing music that was more accessible to people — Jose Gonzales, Beastie Boys, Flash Harry. At first I just had it on shuffle, but then I took a bit more proactive approach and started using iTunes Party Shuffle feature, with a couple of tenets in my head, keep it funky, keep it relaxed and high energy, and mix it up with both familiar and weird.
So I started mixing in a bit more of the stranger tunes I had — 8bit chiptunes and OC Remix tracks! I knew this music would be weird at first, so I kept mixing in more popular music, like DJ Shadow, The Clash, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Gorillaz and some old school house that everyone knows.
One of the young guys there said something about me having a more awesome collection than him… and I felt pretty good about that — I have always thought my collection, while awesome for me, would be completely random for a lot of others.
A lot of the kids were nodding their heads to the tracks that they had only heard for the first time, and one or two were singing along with some of the geeky choruses on occasion too. I think I got the feeling that they liked what I was playing.
So as the night progressed, I started to get even more esoteric than just 8bit beats and video game remix tracks. I cracked out some Jonathan Coulton, a whole lot of Nerdcore: ytcracker, MC Frontalot, MC Hawking, 1337 g33k b34t, Ultraklystron, some random YTMND Soundtrack tracks (I got a good response to Kassius’ Poland Tool Kit o_O; ), and even some Group X. I was still throwing a lot of pop in: Groove Armada, Blur, The White Stripes.
The night wound up as I had to leave in a rush, so I played one last track: Hit the Road Jack by Ray Charles.
I got quite a bit of great feedback throughout the night, and even some laughs! I didn’t get much else done but putting a rudimentary playlist together and enjoying the crowd-of-7 responce while they played Starcraft.
I’ve managed to rescue the ephemerial nature of the list of tracks I played from the Recently Played smart-list iTunes keeps and have saved it as a playlist, and made it available as a PDF for your personal perusal: KBC Lan Party Playlist.
