A post at the Guardian OnlineBlog by Jack Schofield brings out an interesting article in I Pod, You Pod, lovingly subtitled "Welcome to the days of wearing your pretensions -- all of them -- on your hip.
Consider the utopian ideal presented by the iPod and all its disciples: your own badass self, hilariously uncomfortable 'ear bud' headphones jammed into your head, with 5,000 of your favorite songs dumped into a cigarette-pack-size computer set on 'shuffle' so you can veer erratically from King Tubby to King's X to King Missile's 'Detachable Penis' as you pick up the dry cleaning. Radio has failed you. Portable CD players limited you. But now you're an all-powerful DJ, with the single most dangerous item in your home -- your CD collection -- in the palm of your hand.
I know of *nobody* in the 'digital music era' who doesn't wield their music collection as a finely crafted instrument. Perhaps I'm just one of many unusual audiophiles; perhaps I'm a sign of what happens to middle-class, middle-age geeks, who knows.
I do know this: I do know my way around my music collection. All 3,000 albums of it. And I don't buy (or steal) music entirely because I like listening to it - I strategically buy music that I know other people will want to listen to should I end up with a group of them 'round my house for a dinner party.
And some of us *do* like our eclectic music, thank you very much. King Missile was a *revelation* when I was growing up in Milwaukee. Fed up with listening to 90's rock that sounded just like 60's rock, and "new music" that sounded just like MTV, and country music that never seemed to change or evolved, I turned to a little AM radio station called "The WARP".
Set at 1340 on the AM dial, and calling itself Wisconsin's "Alternative Rock" Programming, the "radio station" was nothing more, it seemed, than a little AM transmitter and a four-hour tape loop that changed out every week. It was, however, an amazing tape - playing everything from the Smiths to Katherine Wheel, Indigo Girls to King Missile. It played old R.E.M.; it introduced me to They Might Be Giants. It was, in every sense of the word, eclectic - and it left me completely changed. I listened to that four hour tape loop on every radio I ever ended up next to. These days, I hear, it's "WJYI", and plays Christian rock from a satellite feed (from where, one wonders...)
And you know what? Not only do I still occasionally like to listen to Conway Twitty and the country music I grew up neck deep in, but I still love the Indigo Girls. And King Missile. And Katherine Wheel. And the Smiths. And a bunch of music that turned out to not be "alternative rock" at all, but classic BritPop that you guys grew up listening to as popular music - stuff that rednecks in Wisconsin didn't get a hell of a lot of exposure to.
Music can open one's eyes to other cultures, give someone the dream of seeing the world through different eyes than the ones that have never known anything other than what they see around them.
So I know my music collection pretty well. And I pride myself, as many people who later became DJs do, in being able to find the right music for the right moment, to be able to play the right song at the right time and place in our lives.
So... Dear Mr. Schofield and Mr. Harvilla... Just because you don't "get it", don't believe that there aren't an awful lot of us who do. There are, for example, an awful lot of Technics 1200/1210s on the market - and an awful lot of people who still have their vinyl record collections. Some of us who even buy new vinyl. There are, in short, a lot more people out there who are fanatical about music then there are who have an opinion about politics. There are more people out there who are willing to tell you why they like the music they do than who will tell you who should win the next election; music, for the masses, is now and has always been the way individuals express how they feel and make an emotional connection to themselves and to the world around them.
Never underestimate the strength of the undercurrent of music through our culture.
