I Have Seen the Future, and
It Is Shuffle
In "Listen
to This," his article on classical music in the February 16 & 23, 2004 issue
of The New Yorker, Alex Ross comments on the ability of the iPod (or iTunes, if you
want to be technical about it) to unify all music. Rip your collection and set the program
to Shuffle, Ross posits, and the player will link your music in ways that genre
restrictions would never conceive of. To anyone taught to respect the "color within
the lines" aspect of genre, this is heresy -- or, if not heresy, then anarchy, at the
least.
The thing is, Ross is right. He makes a fascinating point
when he observes that the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic tend to be a generation
younger than the Rolling Stones. Which is the youth music now? Besides, he argues,
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony rocks harder than, say, almost anything by Radiohead -- so what
use are labels?
This doesn't mean that Shuffle Play will always produce
juxtapositions that work. Some transitions really do jar, although in my late-night
listening sessions I've consciously produced some segues that are far more disturbing than
anything iTunes has come up with randomly.
This morning, for example, my iPod jumped from Charlie
Parker to Bob Wills to Bob Dylan to Debussy to Tom Waits to Paul Desmond. Was that a
perfect set? Well, I certainly wasn't bored, but the song-to-song progression wasn't as
smooth as if I’d spent several hours crafting a sequence for my old college radio
show.
But you can't hear radio like my old show most places these
days (he said modestly). Even really good stations -- and they are few and far between --
tend to stick to simple themes and variations. Hearing connections between Missy Elliot's
"Wake Up" and Steve Reich's "Come Out" (a fascinating juxtaposition
suggested by Ross) is almost impossible anywhere other than on your personal
jukebox.
That type of free-form connection is precisely what I love
about digitizing my music collection. It may all be music I know, but combining it in new
and exciting ways feels the same as discovering new stuff.
So I was stunned when I heard two cultural critics holding
forth on the radio today about the "pernicious" isolating impact of the iPod. As
my friend Frank is wont to observe, they said that as if it were a bad thing.
Who are they kidding? People drive around in their own
cars. We don't look strangers in the eye. We bury ourselves in books on subways, trains,
and planes. We sit in cubicles at work. Heck, even when we do ride together in cars these
days, the people in the back seat watch movies (and if you have small children on a long
trip, it's impossible to think of that as a bad thing). What does any of that have
to do with the iPod?
I think it's because they don't have one. I don't mean that
they're envious -- I think people who haven't experienced the freedom granted by a truly
easy-to-use, truly massive music source simply have no idea how liberating it can be. Not
simply because it insulates you from bores, nuts, and tedium as you go about the mundane
tasks of your day-to-day grind, but because it can free you from constraints -- such as
the tyranny of genre -- that are so ingrained you can't even see them. That's not
pernicious, that's exhilarating.
In this, I'm in accord with Alex Ross. I, too, have seen
the future -- and it really is called Shuffle.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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