A Fantastic Musical Timesuck

It must be a blast to work at Polygraph, which describes its mission as “a publication that incites water cooler discussion about complex topics” without long essays and narratives. Instead, they opt for code, visuals and animation to tell these stories.

Like what? Using historical data to rank the most unlikely comebacks in the NBA. Weird parsing of dialogue in movies. Exploring the gender divide in movies. And lots and lots of music stuff.

• Crowdsourcing the definition of punk.
• Measuring the vocabulary of rappers.
• When music becomes popular, faster.

And I love this: the evolution of musical taste. By playlisting the top five songs from every year from 1958 to where we are are in 2016, you can hear how the musical tastes of the general public evolved–as far as Top 40/CHR music is concerned, anyway.

For maximum effect, grab some headphones and click back to 1958. Then just let it roll. We can argue which was the best era for music later.