The Sinister Index
Like many, I like to eat Cheetos, when I'm relaxing and browsing the web, especially when I'm looking for new music. The problem is that Cheetos leaves this nasty residue on the fingers which gets transferred to the keyboard rather quickly. To avoid this problem I like to use my keyboard one handed (I know what you are thinking, but really, its the Cheetos). Which is why one of my favorite bands is Weezer. I can type 'weezer' with my left hand leaving my right hand free for Cheetos, and leaving my keyboard clean. Still, I was in the mood for music by some other bands so I thought it would be interesting to find all of the bands that can be typed using just my left hand. I wrote a Python script, ran it on a list of about 800 thousand artist names and came up with a rather large list of sinister band names. Here are the longest:
der weg des wassers everette red bear sweet ever after state far better cassettezzzzzzzz barbara decesare westgate street streetbeat crew street bastards reve de cabaret rebecca everett cabezas de cera barbara taggart warsaw was raw
Restricting the search to just the more popular artists I find this list of popular sinister artists:
wet wet wet savatage bee gees seabear garbage cascada carcass caesars weezer feeder vader texas sweet stars seeed eve 6 dredg creed vast sade free bebe abba xtc war rza eve era d12 atb afx abc 311 112 bt
To be evenhanded, I offer this list of dexterous artists:
phillip moll phillip hill yumiko ohno yoon il-loh uh uh loony polmo polpo pinko pinko opi yum yum oli oli oli oh no oh my nylon union nylon pylon monki monki homo homini yuko kouno yuho yokoi
And a list of popular dexterous artists:
yoko ono moloko pulp pink mylo mono koop mum iio him l7
There seem to be many more sinister artists than dexterous artists. I suspect that this is because many artists now recognize the Cheetos issue and are selecting sinister names. Since identifying sinister artists is becoming such a big issue in music search, we will likely be offering a sinister index as part of The Echo Nest web services. The sinister index is a number between zero and one that indicates how easy it is to type the artist name with your left hand. Weezer has a sinister index of 1 while Yoko Ono has a sinister index of zero. Look for it soon.