Jonathan Dodd’s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I remember a time when I bought an iPod. It was the first time I ever bought a fruit-based electronic item, and I had a good reason for buying it. At that time Apple made an iPod with a hard disc in. I needed up to 80 gig of space. Nobody else did that.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true, there was a French outfit that made mp3 players with big memories, but all the reviews said that they broke quite often.
Creative Zen
I found a shiny black thing with a square window on the front and a shiny black back, and one of those wheel things for navigation that Apple said they invented, but they actually out-lawyered another company. I knew that because my previous mp3 player was a Creative Zen.
I liked it because it worked just like my PC. I could load up music and start playing, and I could empty it and refill with different music just like that. I wish there was an emoticon for snapping fingers. I’d put it right here. It was called Creative Zen and I felt exactly that when I loaded it up
Those bendy floppy disks
I still have my Creative Zen. It sits in a drawer in my desk with various other abandoned small electronic devices. It’s a bit creepy back there – it’s a deep drawer, and the sun never shines in its depths. It’s a sort of graveyard, and rummaging in there always makes me feel obscurely sad.
The only problem was its memory. There was only 4 gig, although I was able to augment this by inserting an old-fashioned SD card. One of the big ones about the size of a postage stamp that seemed like a miracle, now so outdated they look like those bendy floppy disks you used to have to crank into your PC.
With the largest memory possible
I used to scoff at various young people in my family because they wanted mp3 players with the largest memory possible. They used to have earnest conversations about how they had 56 gig of music, which they could play continuously for 318 days without ever repeating a track.
I also knew at that time people who uploaded e-books. They all seemed to be excessively pleased that they could do this for nothing with pirated copies. They also loved to tell me that they had over 3,000 books on their Kindle, or whatever.
1500 days without reading anything twice
I know that it takes at least 12 hours to read even a short book, so they were telling me that they could start reading without stopping right through the day and night for 1,500 days without reading anything twice. That’s four years. I used to tease them by asking which of their e-books was their favourite.
These people had one thing in common. They were collectors. It was more important to them to have a very large quantity of books or songs than to listen or read. I knew someone even earlier who collected cassettes. He had 12,000 and never listened to any of them.
An mp3 player with a big hard disc
He said he was going to listen to them when he retired. He used to have the same number of records, but checked them out when cassettes came in. I suppose he repeated that when CDs came in, and now has some enormous number of mp3 songs inside a huge hard disc.
Having known all this for ages, and repeating the stories, I got a lot of teasing when I announced that I was looking for an mp3 player with a big hard disc. I duly agreed, I was a bit of an idiot, and I apologised to all those who I had ridiculed previously. I’m not proud.
Needle resembled an old rusty nail
There was a significant thing that arrived back then, which I hadn’t known about. I grew up in the age of records. LPs were big, and precious. You could lend one and it could come back ploughed by someone whose needle resembled an old rusty nail, or they could just scratch it to hell and back.
The practice then was to put an LP on and listen to the whole side. A lot of bands took enormous time and trouble to choose the playing order because if was fixed and dictated the experience. I didn’t know anybody who ever played individual tracks, because it was so much trouble getting up and changing the disc all the time.
The Shuffle button
The thing I discovered, that I hadn’t known about, was the Shuffle button. I had been collecting mp3 music for years, from all sorts of sources. I never went in for wholesale pirating, like a lot of people I knew. It just felt wrong. I didn’t always buy the CDs and rip them, which is allowed, but I did borrow a lot, often from libraries, and I found a lot in shops and markets and on eBay. And sometimes I shared music with other people.
I ended up with rather a lot. It’s all mixed up, and almost the entire history and geography of music is represented in my collection. I have my favourites, and most of my CD collection in there, and a lot of music I would never have heard if I hadn’t swapped music with friends, or just taken a chance on something on a market stall or in a boot fair.
Every track as if for the first time
The particular magic in the shuffle button is the complete randomness of it. You always knew what you were going to hear next, track three followed track two as night did day, and you’d probably put on something similar next. Or turn it over. It was great while it lasted, but the shuffle button means that you hear every track as if for the first time, because it’s always completely unexpected.
I swear sometimes that I hear a track that’s wonderful, and have no memory of how or why I acquired it, or even how long I had it before hearing it. This may pass you by entirely, but to me it’s a continual daily source of joy and wonder. I wrote once of driving to Titchfield in the early morning, an empty M27 and Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive on really loud. I could tell a story like that almost every day.
Of which I know nothing
This morning I was listening while running on a treadmill at Medina, and I heard the first part of Harold in Italy, followed by Me and Julio at the School Yard, then a bangy thing by New Order, followed by something by the Be Good Tanyas, and an early Leonard Cohen, then something French by a band called Autour de Lucie, of which I know nothing except that I loved it, and Laura Nyro singing Eli’s Coming. That’s what I can remember.
Nowadays I don’t need that Apple device any more, because I have a tiny Micro-CD card smaller than my little fingernail in my phone. It contains 64 gig of space, nearly filled with 58 gig of music. I can add or remove folders of files at will, and it delivers a miracle of wonder and joy direct into my ears via my tiny headphones, and I feel a little sad for all the generations before, that didn’t have the chances and experiences available to them that we have right now.
The drawer of electronic misery
As for that iPod, it’s in the back of the drawer of electronic misery. I could never get used to that ridiculous iTunes software that I was forced to use. It took my music and swallowed it into some unrecognisable and unfindable morass, it constantly lost it all, or it wouldn’t recognise my iPod. I lost count of the times I screamed at it because iTunes wouldn’t recognise it even after it had told me all it needed to do was update the software, or it refused to let me upload or download music.
I know that other people seem to get along quite happily with fruit-based electronic devices, but I value things that help you to do things easily to improve the quality of your life, rather than force you down increasingly narrow avenues of weirdness and illogic, as if they know how to do things and there are no alternatives. Even when there are easy alternatives right next to you.
Oh oh! I can feel another anti-Apple rant coming on. Quick! Put the earphones in, press Play. Ah! Joe Walsh! Life’s Been Good! Oh, it has! I wonder what comes next? I have no idea! How wonderful!
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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