Robert of the Radish
I built Crate.
Not a corporation. A listener who kept playing the same thirty records while the rest of the shelf sat. Crate is the thing I wanted beside the turntable: the copies in the room, one on tonight, the night written down.
The same job, pointed at a shelf
Before Crate I spent years making huge catalogs feel finite. Subscription services had more songs than anyone could hold in their head. Someone had to hang a list on a hook so you could press play. That was the work: constraint lists, event lists, cover archaeology, holiday sets, the odd anti-list. Playlist as criticism. A human index, not a search box.
Crate is that job aimed at vinyl you already paid for. The catalog is not twenty million tracks. It is the wall in front of you.
The Worst of the Worst
Around 2000 the first public version of that habit ran the other way. The Worst of the Worst was an MP3.com station of truly bad amateur tracks, each with a sarcastic blurb and a Torture Factor score. Same cataloger’s patience. Inverse taste. Time, NPR, The Seattle Times, and The Dallas Morning News wrote about it.
The Radish
By 2004 that habit had a name and a service. The Rhapsody Radish published themed playlists — subject, situation, hits, covers, and stranger frames — each with a one-click load inside Rhapsody. A week of lists could run from Woodstock’s anniversary to twenty versions of Light My Fire to songs about horses. The tagline treated “radish” as vegetable and product: a high quality streaming music playlist.
CNET used the work as proof that playlists were the future of music. Blogcritics carried the weekly lists. The Honolulu Advertiser wrote about playlist tastemakers when Yahoo and Rhapsody still needed humans to cut the catalog down to a sentence.
Yahoo made it a house voice. On the Y! Music Playlist Blog I wrote as Robert of the Radish: riot songs, bankers and capitalism titles, ten classic-rock songs that use a gong, Nevermind rebuilt from covers, weekly independent albums. Yahoo already had radio and a store. The Radish was the editorial layer that told a subscriber what to play.
What carried over
Not hits. Not original recordings. A way of listening:
- Constraint — rubber, gongs, palindromes, a tuba in a rock song
- Occasion — a festival, a storm, a holiday, a night in the chair
- Archaeology — one album rebuilt from covers, a producer’s catalog, a setlist from a room
- The anti-list — what not to play, on purpose
The old sites are mostly dead. The voice is in the Wayback Machine. Crate is the live desk now. The liner notes Crate writes for a sleeve are the same instinct: make the record in your hands feel held, not searched.
I am still a listener. Crate is still one person’s tool that other owners can use.
No app to download. Open it beside the platter.