Every Single Name on This Entrancing Map Is a Music Reference | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/2016/11/every-single-name-entrancing-map-music-reference/?mbid=social_twitter
My favorite #song about California is Scott McKenzie’s 1967 easy-listening hippie anthem “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” I’ll admit: It’s not the best song about the Golden State. But I still like it. When I was a teenager, years before ever visiting San Francisco, the saccharine song seemed to encompass all the promises of the West Coast: good vibrations, counter culture, and flower crowns (Coachella hadn’t ruined them yet).
The “#World_Song_Map” is designed to encourage that kind of imaginary meandering. It looks like a classic #Mercator projection, but with song titles instead of place names. “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” is there, and, a little to the south, so is “LA Woman.”
Not all the song labels are as literal as the aforementioned examples. “We wanted to combine the real places (e.g. ‘Back In The USSR,’ ‘London Calling,’ ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn,’ ‘Tour De France’) with descriptions (‘River Deep,’ ‘Mountain High,’ ‘I Am A Rock,’ ‘Summer Night City,’ ‘Teenage Wasteland,’)” says Phil Skegg, the designer at Dorothy who created the map. The #data-viz also includes a few winks: in reference to global warming, the waters near Earth’s northern ice cap are named after LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge." Joy Division’s “Isolation” goes to North Korea. In total, the map includes 1,200 song titles and around 200 musical references.
