A modified Tap an engineer equipped with a skull so Alexa could be more personable; Photo: YouTube
As Amazon prepares to take over the world, the co-opting tech giant has tossed the lyric world some breadcrumbs with a peek at the Top 50 phrases people are requesting on their home speaker assistants, a.k.a. Alexa via devices like the Echo.
Or rather, the most popular utterances following the command, “Alexa, play the song that goes…”
As much as we’d like to derive some sort of socio-cultural narrative from this Big Data list, an overhead view doesn’t reveal much more than what you’d probably see aggregated from one of those digital jukeboxes at your local bar.
“I came in like a wrecking ball” (Miley Cyrus‘ “Wrecking Ball“), “I got this feeling inside my bones,” (Justin Timberlake‘s Trolls contribution, “Can’t Stop the Feeling“) all trail in the top five spots right behind the No. 1 requested phrase from that annoying Fitz and the Tantrums song about handclaps.
One could, perhaps, say that those three phrases right there would evoke legions of 16-25-year-old Americans as Amazon’s core demographic for the Alexa, but then there’s a classic boomer rock phrase in there at No. 2 with Steppenwolf‘s “head out on the highway,” from “Born to be Wild.”
Elsewhere you’ve got your obligatory Hamilton joint, a Beatles‘ “Yellow Submarine” nod, and then everything from Big Country Pop (Jason Aldean, Lukas Graham) to Big…Pop (Katy Perry, Ed Sheeran, Drake) and a handful of equally Big Rap tracks, i.e. Lil Uzi Vert‘s “Llif3,” with the morbid line “push me to the edge all my friends are dead” most requested.
If anything, this list reveals that a non-sequitor — “hello darkness my old friend,” from Disturbed‘s cover of the Simon & Garfunkel classic, “The Sound of Silence” — can be just as memorable as a chorus made up of a single word, like “work,” from Fifth Harmony‘s “Work from Home” (No. 25).
Otherwise, the two greatest oddities to see on here are “that’s the sound of the police,” from KRS-One‘s anti-oppression boom bap 1993 gem “Sound of Da Police,” (No. 36) and “the greatest song in the world,” from Tenacious D‘s comedy rock cut, “Tribute,” dead last at No. 50.
Check out the full list that Amazon made in to a playlist, as well, here.