Answering Even More Big Ones

Part 1, Part 2

Propane vs Charcoal

Propane is a rapper that's been around since at least 2010, featured a lot on other people's stuff, who has really only released one album. His style isn't particularly memorable, but he can rap. He's like one of those lesser-known rappers who gets featured in the troll-bridge section of a lot of pop songs, you know? That rapping bit that doesn't fit in and comes out of nowhere? That kind of thing.

Charcoal Tongue is a metal band that released a single at the beginning of 2017. It's an okay metal song, but they're not readily discernible from a dozen other metal/hard rock bands that have a really screamy lead singer. In fact, I'm still listening to the song and I've already forgotten what it sounds like.

Both artists are kinda forgettable, but at least Propane has more than one single. Propane wins.

Edward vs Jacob

Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros are, as of their most recent album released in 2016, evidently trying to drop the Edward Sharpe part of their name, based on the album artwork. They're an alt rock 10-piece band (10 piece!) from SoCal that formed in 2007. They've got a very folky sort of sound, but they're pretty good, and their music is unique. If you like alternative music you might want to look them up.

Jacob Latimore is a pop/R&B artist from Wisconsin. He's been releasing stuff since a single of his was played on Radio Disney in 2005. He was, at the time, 9 years old. He's currently 21, and has been releasing pretty regularly during that whole time. Some of his songs are pretty good, but consistently his best work is the stuff that was written by somebody else. Everything he's performed that I've got access to is so heavily autotuned that his voice loses anything memorable that might have been there, which bothers me on a fundamental level.

Weirdly, both artists have been around about the same amount of time and released about the same amount of music. But one is unique and interesting while the other is derivative and post-processed beyond recognition. Edward wins.

Peta vs Gale

Peta is... a dude... maybe German? Who recorded a song in his bathroom using a hand-me-down Mac with an installation of GarageBand and a rudimentary understanding of how 80's soft-rock sounded. His voice is toneless and uninteresting, the instrumentation is straight out of a really bad "jazzercise" VHS, and the album artwork is a shirtless selfie taken in the aforementioned bathroom. Dude didn't even bother to get a good night's sleep before taking that picture. It's honestly the most disturbing thing I've ever seen on iTunes.

Gale is either a Spanish speaking pop artist who started releasing music in early 2016, or a new age artist that evidently hasn't done anything noteworthy since 2005. What I'm learning most from this exercise may actually be how frequently iTunes combines artists in its database. I'm going to judge this based on option number 1, because if I go with number 2 then we'll wind up with a draw in this comparison, and the fans just can't have that.

There's little doubt that Peta is useless, disturbing, and generally just the worst. While Gale may not exactly be the greatest ever, he's pretty clearly the much better option of the two. It's kinda weird how well this exchange tracked the movies, but in the end, it's still not a competition. Gale wins.

Breast vs Bottle

Breast Massage is, in a move that actually did surprise me, the only artist on Apple Music to actually have the word "breast" in their name. They are a uh, sort of alternative metal band. Think Sufjan Stevens meets screechy guitars. They've got one EP, which came out not too long ago, and overall it's boring at best, when it's not actively unpleasant to listen to. And I mean that. Listening to this music caused me literal discomfort, and it's not like that's because it was exceptionally crude or anything, it's because the music is really that bad.

The first artist to come up under a Bottle search is The Bottle Rockets, a roots rock band that formed in 1992 in Festus Missouri. They've been releasing new music every few years ever since, with their last album coming out in 2015. Roots rock isn't my favorite thing, but their songs are at least somewhat original and they're not a bad representation of the genre. These guys are okay.

When one half of a comparison causes actual pain, no amount of blatant mediocrity is going to beat that half to the bottom. Bottle wins.

Toyota vs Honda

Technically the first result for Toyota is LINKA (CV:MOE TOYOTA), an artist name that seems to only apply to two songs from the Groove Coaster original soundtrack. But since I'm pretty sure that means the artist is actually LINKA featuring another artist, Moe Toyota, I'm not going to count that. So I'm going with The Toyota Pipes and Drums. Because who doesn't love bagpipes? They released a single album in 2003, but I've got to say their performance of Amazing Grace... well, could have been lifted directly from any one of a dozen other pipe bands. They also have pipe arrangements of stuff like the theme from The Magnificent Seven, and feature 80's synth bands in place of horns or actual drums on several tracks, so... the group is odd, is what I'm saying.


Here again, the first artist didn't actually have the word Honda anywhere in their name, so we're going with the second, dj honda. dj honda is a Japanese native who found some success as a hip-hop DJ in the mid-to-late 90's. He has maintained something of a presence ever since by working the dance circuit and releasing beat samplers and remixes. As a dance DJ I don't think anyone would be upset to have this guy at the front of a club, though most people probably wouldn't really notice anything particularly special about the music.

In the end I think this comes down to a test of skill. While I maybe prefer the music of The Toyota Pipes and Drums, they're not especially interesting as far as pipes bands go, and several songs lean on completely uninspired synth work. At the very least, dj honda actually can drop some sick beats. Honda wins.

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