Playlists can say a lot about a person. They can trigger memories. They are like dividing life into chapters. Here we look at the musical tastes of three people who have become cornerstones of culture.
Steve Jobs, co-founder, Apple
Steve Jobs became one with the iPod and iTunes. He clearly loved music. During his presentations before the media, he often relied on the music of Bob Dylan and the Beatles.
The co-founder of Apple once said: “My model of business is the Beatles. There were four guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts.”
His love for Dylan is the stuff of legend, constantly returning to songs like Like a Rolling Stone, Ballad of a Thin Man and Mr Tambourine Man.
He was equally in awe of the music of Yo-Yo Ma and John Mayer. When, in 2004, he introduced GarageBand 1.0, he wanted to showcase the power of “loops”. He chose guitar and ‘rock and blues’, followed by something that was “relaxed”. Then he added a bass, followed by more instruments. Soon, he had a short piece of music going.
Then he brought out John Mayer to add some guitar magic. The man’s fingers wowed the audience.
Walter Isaacson writes in Jobs’s biography that Yo-Yo Ma and the Apple man were close friends. “There was one classical musician Jobs revered both as a person and a performer: Yo-Yo Ma, the versatile virtuoso who is as sweet and profound as the tones he creates on his cello. They had met in 1981, when Jobs was at the Aspen Design Conference and Ma was at the Aspen Music Festival. Jobs tended to be deeply moved by artists who displayed purity, and he became a fan. He invited Ma to play at his wedding, but he was out of the country on tour. He came by the Jobs house a few years later, sat in the living room, pulled out his 1733 Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. ‘This is what I would have played for your wedding,’ he told them. Jobs teared up and told him, ‘Your playing is the best argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don’t really believe a human alone can do this.’ On a subsequent visit Ma allowed Jobs’s daughter Erin to hold the cello while they sat around the kitchen. By that time Jobs had been struck by cancer, and he made Ma promise to play at his funeral.”
Jane Austen played the piano and sang throughout her life. Getty Images
The years he dated Joan Baez were also a way of getting close to his idol Bob Dylan, whom he met in 2004. Jobs was recovering from his first cancer surgery. In October 2004 Dylan was playing near Palo Alto. “We sat on the patio outside his room and talked for two hours,” said Jobs. “I was really nervous, because he was one of my heroes. And I was also afraid that he wouldn’t be really smart anymore, that he’d be a caricature of himself, like happens to a lot of people. But I was delighted. He was as sharp as a tack. He was everything I’d hoped.”
They soon met again and Jobs told him that his favourite song was One Too Many Mornings. Dylan played it that night.
“He’s one of my all-time heroes,” said Jobs. “My love for him has grown over the years, it’s ripened. I can’t figure out how he did it when he was so young.”
The Beatles, too, were a part of him. In one of his last interviews, he met Bill Gates on stage and, describing their friendship, Jobs said: “There is that one line in a Beatles song (Two of Us) — You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead. That’s clearly true here.”
He never met any of the four Beatles. In 1984, months after the original Macintosh announcement, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono invited him to their son Sean’s birthday. He went and gave Sean a Macintosh as a gift. They met again in 1997 when Jobs was looking for Lennon’s photos for his Think Different ads. Jobs called Ono to get a photo, she sent him one, which he disliked, so he told her he’d be at a Japanese restaurant in New York. Ono went and gave him a better photo, which Apple ended up using for its campaign.
He also found comfort in Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, first recorded in 1969, and again in 2000. “It’s interesting how people age,” he told Isaacson.
A glimpse into Steve Jobs’s playlist: Bob Dylan — Like a Rolling Stone, Desolation Row, Ballad of a Thin Man, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, Mr Tambourine Man and Tangled Up in Blue. The Beatles — I Should Have Known, If I Fell, Nowhere Man, With a Little Help from My Friends, Across the Universe, Carry That Weight, When I’m Sixty-Four and Lovely Rita.
Jane Austen
Women, in their heart of hearts, want to meet their own Mr Darcy. His creator, Jane Austen, most probably spent much of her time listening to music in between writing novels that are now considered classics.
Some scholars believe that Eliza de Feuillide, her cousin and sister-in-law, even hosted a musical soirée at her home in 1811 to celebrate the publication of Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility.
So what kind of music did she enjoy? We can turn to The Austen Family Music Books, a collection of 18 volumes of music, plus some loose sheets, belonging to Jane Austen and her extended family. These were digitised in 2015 by the University of Southampton and are freely available on Internet Archive. Some of the music is printed, but much of it is manuscript copied by various members of the Austen family. There are approximately 158 pieces of music identified as copied in Jane Austen’s own handwriting.
Austen herself played the piano and sang throughout most of her life. She and her family carefully copied music by hand into personal albums, and collected the sheet music that poured from London presses.
If Jane Austen had a playlist: Robin Adair, La Marseillaise and Anna.
Anthony Bourdain. CNN
Anthony Bourdain
His job was a complicated one — narrating the story of cultures through food while the backdrop was history and music. Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville, while researching Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, discovered the music that kept Bourdain going.
“He was a real culture vulture, and he devoured books. He devoured music, and he devoured movies. I’m the same way,” Neville told CNN. “I understood by the type of music he liked, the type of books he liked and the type of movies he liked, how he saw the world to some extent, and that helped inform how I could tell his story.”
One of Neville’s favourite songs is one Bourdain had posted on his Instagram Stories — Forbidden Colours by Ryuichi Sakamoto. It’s the theme song to the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, a story about the Japanese-British war. Anemone by The Brian Jonestown Massacre was another of his favourites, according to his friend David Chang.
Another of Bourdain’s favourites was Iggy and The Stooges. Bourdain wrote about The Stooges’ first album, saying it’s “an antisocial masterpiece of do-it-yourself aggression and raw, nasty, dirty rock and roll”.
On Anthony Bourdain’s playlist: The Burning Spear by Sonic Youth, Beautiful Strangers by Kevin Morby, I Saw the Light by Todd Rundgren, The Passenger by Iggy Pop, Heroes by David Bowie, Crush with Eyeliner by R.E.M., Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club, The Man in Me by Bob Dylan, Monkey Man by The Rolling Stones and Roadrunner by The Modern Lovers.