iPhones have good music taste

June 4, 2007

Last night, the new iPhone ads premiered and now all three of them are posted at Apple’s website (you can even watch the ads in HD). One thing I noticed, other than how freaking awesome these little gadgets are is that the iPhone (or the guy with perfectly manicured hands that uses it) has pretty great music taste. The albums that are featured prominently in the ads are: Beck – Information, Elliott Smith – XO (!), Lily Allen – Alright Still, Gnarles Barkley – St. Elsewhere, Lupe Fiasco – Food & Liquor and Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero.

If you look closely, though, there’s a wealth of other good music that the iPhone is playing (Yeah, I went frame-by-frame, I’m a dork). This includes:

Feist – The Reminder
Brazilian Girls - Talk to la Bomb
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – s/t
Beastie Boys – The Mix Up
The White Stripes - Icky Thump (Single)
The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
R.E.M. – Automatic For The People
Kaiser Chiefs – Yours Truly, Angry Mob
The Postal Service – Give Up
Smashing Pumpkins – Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness
Muse – Black Holes And Revelations
The Noisettes – What’s The Time Mr Wolf?

This proves that iPhones are pretty ridiculously up-to-date and possibly British, ince the Noisettes album hasn’t arrived in the US yet.* It seems that the iPhone stays away from top-of-charts popular music for the most part (I did see traces of Dashboard Confessional and Maroon 5, I guess it has some guilty pleasures), and appreciates some of the classics (greatest hits albums from Elvis Costello, James Brown, and Marvin Gaye are seen). You also might want to note that the Beastie Boys album that is loaded up doesn’t come out till the end of June (how come the iPhone can get on Capitol’s promo mailing list and I can’t?).

*ed. note – I mistook the album for being not released in the US, when really it was just unavailable at Amazon at the time. Oops!

Another thing we see is the iPhones movie/tv list (albeit very briefly) and we can see that it has a episodes of both Heroes and Office on the queue (Amazingly, the iPhone is on the very same episode of Heroes that I’m on, I just watched 14 last night). Two movies are featured in the ads, the first one being major blockbuster and Disney shoe-in Pirate of the Caribbean but the other one was of even greater interest to me – Zoolander (!).

They showed a few seconds from the walk-off (”What say we settle this on the runway… Han-Solo?”) and it made me feel all good inside. I guess the response they got from the Zoolander clip showed at Macworld was good enough to put it inside the ad (or Stevie just loves the movie). Either way, the new ads are really awesome and I am dying to get my hands on one of those. Here’s some appropriate MP3s that an iPhone might be listening to right now:

MP3 Lily Allen – Smile
MP3 Elliott Smith – Tomorrow Tomorrow
MP3 Feist – I Feel It All
MP3 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Is This Love?
MP3 The Noisettes – Don’t Give Up

Posted by Taylor in Mix, Tech, Video