Zapruder Point
Consumer/Songwriter

I wish I could tell you why I feel so awfully ambivalent about my iPod. I’ve taken to calling it a “glorified walkman,” but that’s just a cheap shot; it doesn’t come close to articulating my lukewarm feelings. Back when the Cubs were still playing well, I thought I just wanted the thing to have a radio, but that would merely make it a glorified AM/FM walkman. No, there’s something else, and I’m not sure I can summon it up.

I guess I expected that having this thing (along with the iBook and iTunes and the Chicken iNuggets) would cause me to slap my head in the same V-8 style I used when I first started downloading mp3s (legally) at work. But just as in my twenties, with my handful of failed attempts to graduate from alcohol to pot, I’m left here shaking my head. It’s kind of cool in kind of the same way…but what’s the point, really?

It’s anticlimactic, and for weeks now I’ve been unable to put my finger on why. Mp3s, as flawed as they are, have revolutionized the mobility of music. And in their wake, any music geek such as I will open the floodgates to a current of songs old and new–the likes of which I haven’t been submerged in since college. This in itself is cause to celebrate, as I’ve already said in these, erm, pages. Now assuming (unsafely, in my opinion, but let’s just go with it) that having these compressed little files is the same to me as having a proper CD or album…

But there I’ve given myself away. Calling an uncompressed CD cut a “proper” version of a song is a sure way to show my age, eh? And that’s what I really think this is all about, why I’m not enthralled with the iPod and the rest of it: my age and the irreversible, undeniable way it informs my understanding of music. It’s one thing to be, thanks to new technology, suddenly exposed to a lot of music. It’s another thing entirely to expect that same technology to organize your music in any way similar to the Gutenberg-old idea of record spines peering out from the shelves.

Which is not to say I don’t enjoy my iPod, that I’m not impressed with its ability to carry around 90 albums (I’ve got the mini) at a time. And I don’t want to knock iTunes completely; as a data organization system, it’s terribly efficient and outrageously pretty.

But that’s just it. No matter how sexy the interface, no matter how deviously swapped or stolen, we’re talking, here, about files and data. And with files and data, with naked digital bits you title and sort on a screen, there seems to be a hazy layer of anonymity between you and whatever comes out of the speakers.

And as the store component of iTunes demonstrates, the ease of buying these things is strictly a consumer perk, not an aesthetic one. Indeed, the line between checking a band out and buying their product has practically disappeared, since the line between the files at a download store like iTunes and the files on your hard drive is merely two or three clicks thin. My God, man! Before I buy your album, is it too much to ask for dinner and a movie first?

But seriously. I think what I’m getting at here (aside from a gob-smacking culture-wide willingness to stomach a HUGE plummet in audio quality–but that’s another rant), is a disappearing thing-ness to music appreciation. And I know we’re getting into a slippery area here, that it’s easy to denounce any object as product, any worshipping of that object as consumerism. But in my short lifetime I can honestly say I’ve experienced CDs, records and cassettes as so much more. Whether we acquire them in a brick-and-mortar or slip them to each other at parties, whether they’re stacked on the edge of our desk as we’re working late at night or they’re held in our laps as we read the lyrics–they’re things that matter. And in a way they cease to matter if they’re not…well…things.

My drug of choice happens to be nicotine. I haven’t had it for a few years, but I continue to safely say that even though cigarettes rarely enter my thoughts nowadays, not smoking them is probably the most important thing I do on a daily basis. No joke.

When I first started to put ‘em down, though, every day was a struggle. There’s this saying among recovering addicts, an apt description of what happens when you first start living without your drug. It doesn’t read very well without inflection, but here goes: “The good news is that you get your emotions back; the bad news is that you get your emotions back.” Such was my roller coaster in the summer of ‘99.

Feelings came back with an intensity I’d been without for most of my adult life. With them came various problems–real ones and melodrmatic fakes my mind would invent just to get me to light up again. One problem that seemed at home in both categories was music. I had no idea how to fit songs, those perfect three-minute conduits of emotion, into my life when it seemed like any excess feeling would send me skidding off the road I was gingerly treading. I remember my guitar staring at me from the corner of my apartment for at least two months. When I finally did play it, a song called “Jay” came out, so there was proof that I could handle making a song. But when it came to listening…

I borrowed this Rainer Maria CD from my friend John and I liked it well enough–I liked it a lot, in fact. But the second song on it, “Planetary,” was almost too good–too emotional, actually–for me to handle. (Fitting, since Rainer Maria truck in “emo,” a musical style that was just then receiving its first brutal backlash. But anyway.) When I listened to “Planetary,” its verses repeating very specific visuals (“the skyline is three gazes wide / and I bump my head against the windshield”), its choruses erupting into dewey-eyed, sweaty-palmed platitudes (“MOMENTUM MAKES MYYYYY HEAD PONDEROUS AND HEAVY”), it made me want to drive too fast, drink too much, make out with girls whose last names I didn’t know. More immediately, it almost made me want to smoke.

So for a couple weeks there, I just had to sit that one out; my skip button was employed whenever Look Now Look Again was in the stereo. Eventually, like with everything, I got to enjoy it fully once I learned that emotions can’t kill you–that no song can actually put a gun to your head, or a cigarette in your mouth. And hey: Late 2001, Rainer Maria’s next album, A Better Version of Me, was even more orchestrally emotive than its predecessor. And I listened to it all the way through, over and over and over.