5 & 6 October 2013 (Days 278 & 279) – The Miseducation of otis.youth Pt.7

It was another incredibly busy weekend which included a trip into the country for a speaking engagement as well as birthday celebrations for a family member.  “M” accompanied me to both and so there was no time for playing items from my collection.  But it presents the opportunity for:

The Miseducation of otis.youth Pt.7

My marriage to “M” was basically my second in less than a year.  About six to eight months previously I began my relationship with my iPod.  Out of love and respect for “M” I have not given my iPod a name, even though the various Walkmen I’d owned previously were all named “Iggy” (i.e Iggy, Iggy1, Iggy2, etc, none of this IT “Iggy vers.0.2” crap).   But realistically, it really is my iPod that should be named because it is been my longtime companion ever since I purchased it.  There is barely a situation where I’m likely to be on my own when it is not with me.

Oddly for such clingy behaviour, I resisted embracing the digital revolution for a very long period of time.  As I’ve written previously, the turning point came when I was sitting in a café and listened to what I thought was the world’s best radio station only to discover it was the owner’s iPod on shuffle.  From that moment onwards, the purchase of one had become a priority.  I had done some DJ stints in the privacy of my own home but the mechanics of selection and playing were so time consuming to leave me little room to actually enjoy my sequencing.  

I then resolved to buy an iPod classic 160GB duty free as part of my trip to Europe to meet “M”s parents and get engaged.  I organised things brilliantly, first checking out the retail price at JB and other retailers as well as the duty free shops in the city and at Melbourne Airport prior to our departure.  I knew prices in Europe would be high owing to the state of the $AUS at the time and this turned out to be the case.  No problems, I thought, thinking I could easily pick up a cheaper one on our stopover in Hong Kong on the way back.  There, I could not barter the price down with any seller past the duty free rate for the same item back home.  (I think this is why the retailers there also start negotiations by asking you from where you come.  I suspect they have the duty free rate for each of the major spending tourist nationalities memorised.)

Again, not a problem I thought, I could pick up one at Melbourne Airport at the end of my flight and before I passed through customs.  That plan was stymied when the assistant at the counter informed me that stock had been exhausted.  In the weeks that followed, I could not find one for sale anywhere in Australia.  (It appeared that Apple had withdrawn them from sale only to reintroduce them a couple of years later.) I eventually purchased mine almost by mistake.  Waiting for “M” to emerge from a woman’s clothing shop at a shopping centre, I idly turned to a mobile phone stall behind me and asked whether they had a classic.  The salesman rang through to HQ who informed me the entire phone chain had one Classic left in all of Melbourne.  I quickly purchased it for a price that turned out to be less than even the duty free rate.

My purchase meant that I had to embrace the mp3 world as I quickly came to grips with concepts such as import, playlist and synch.  I taught myself to put my library onto a portable hard drive rather than my laptop so I could import a quantity of music greater than the iPod’s capacity.  As I didn’t have internet access until this year, I imported tracks from the CDs in my collection and manually typed in the song and album details.  Fortunately for “M” I wasn’t interested in adding detail such as genre, songwriters, year of release, etc, just the album name, artist name, song titles and the cover, otherwise I ‘d still be engaged in the task.  And I could never work out why anyone would want to rate individual tracks using their star system.  If you think a track is worth only none or one stars, why would you put it on your iPod in the first place?  As I import only entire albums or discs, I never think in those terms anyway.

The selection of albums to be imported was easily the most difficult task.  Most of the key albums really picked themselves.  I had no qualms about selecting multiple albums for many acts such as The Stones, Springsteen, Neil Young, etc.  There are also a number of great one off albums such as the 2ManyDJ’s As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2, or acts whose entire career is based on one blindingly great album (Macy Gray, for example).  It’s all the acts in between that provide the real selection headaches. There’s no real formula for picking these; I just go with my instincts.

The other headache comes from those, mostly pioneer, acts that do not have a truly representative album.  This has resulted in my purchase of an increasing number of compilation best or greatest hits albums.  It might not be readily apparent, but I’ve found the purchase of such albums to be quite a difficult task as I seek to convince myself about which of these releases truly represents the artist in question and contains all of the material of theirs that I would want. 

This is all of crucial importance because, as time goes by, I find myself increasing listening to just the music on the iPod.  Usually, and this blog confirms my thought, I’m unable to spend much time listening to music at home.   As the CD player in my car has died, I can’t listen there but this issue will be fixed later this year when I’ll purchase a new car.  It will re-establish its position as the place where I’ll effectively play my CDs.  For newly purchased albums, the car doubles as my audition unit; as I listen to an album the thought that immediately runs through my mind will be whether it is reasonable enough to be iPod worthy. 

The one thing that my iPod has not influenced is my need to find and listen to music I’d like to hear.  Even more importantly, the advent of digital music has not altered my desire to collect it.  I still want music to be a tangible object – either a commercially produced CD or one burnt from a digital representation I’ve purchased.  I don’t see the logic of that sits behind today’s digital world (i.e if you no longer like the music, delete it) as this would mean that the vision of the early music hustlers will have sadly come true – that popular music and acts are essentially fads that can be treated as disposable objects. 

I’d hate to see this vision of music be adopted by the world at large.  My personal voyage into music has resulted in my investing far too much time, effort and emotion.  The payoffs, discovering sensation tracks or passages and hearing them for the first time, the excitement on discovering something I didn’t know existed in a shop or online or being at a brilliant gig, have been more than worth it.  Or to put it another way, as put by Van Morrison in titling his first live album, It’s too late to stop now.