Rather than work on my second interview with Nyles Lannon (which will be one of the best interviews to date), I decided to do something I had not done in quite a while: attempt to write an actual article.
I Believe in Consonants: My Life Without an iPod
Today, as I was looking through a six month-old issue of Paste magazine, I thought about how I never read music magazines anymore. Fifteen years ago, my dream would have been to write for one. But now, they just seem dated and constantly behind the curve - even the best ones. That's the reality of living in this digital age where your status may be dictated by which version of the iPod, or iPhone, you own.
Shocking admission number one: I do not own an iPod or an iPhone.
Shocking admission number two: I still buy compact discs.
Last weekend, on a trip to Target, my wife and I were discussing how we weren't, "iPod people." While it may be the greatest musical breakthrough since the Walkman, it seems like a waste of time and money. At least it does to me.
Believe me, I know how asinine that statement sounds. Millions upon millions of people have them. Apple reinvented itself with it. It makes taking your favorite music where ever you go as easy as carrying your wallet.
But still, the idea of spending $300 on an iPod?
It's not like I am anti-digital music. Far from it. I started downloading MP3s at college in 1997. What do you do when you have access to a T3? You use it. And when you can download 40 different remixes of The Cure's, "A Forest"? You do. When your college wipes your account and there is no way save your MP3s? You cry. When you get a real job and a dial-up internet connection and to try download MP3s? You stop.
Since I started DeadJournalist.com in March 2006, I've used it as a tool to realize my want to start a music magazine. But the music magazine is a music web site, and while I do have my fair share of readers, it doesn't exactly have the readership of Rolling Stone in 1973. But I evolved with technology just as I evolved with music.
So if I could channel my creative outlet to a technological form, what can't I take my music there?
Maybe it started when the iPod came out - just in time for Christmas 2001. It had been a rough year and I was starting over with a new company and a new career. I wanted one, but frankly, I couldn't afford an iPod. When you are living on Taco Bell and generic lasagna, investing in a MP3 player isn't the like the wisest of choices.
As the years went on, my pay increased and the iPod got bigger and better. I had bought a laptop, gotten high-speed internet, began downloading MP3s like it was 1997 all over again and even started deejaying using MP3s. One could have drawn a logical conclusion I had added an iPod to my list of depreciating assets. But I hadn't.
I could never shake the feeling that if I moved all my music to MP3 and sold my CDs, as several of my friends had done, I would somehow manage to loose my iPod and in turn, loose all of my music. But that could never happen, right? Plus, my music would be backed-up on a laptop, so what could go wrong? Sure, it sounds great in theory, but for some reason, I could never buy in to it.
So I kept doling out $10 or $15 a pop for compact discs, save when Tower Records and Blockbuster Music (or whatever it had changed its name to) had going out of business sales allowing me to spend $100 on 30 CDs. Before I knew it, a couple hundred CDs because a couple thousand CDS. It was CDs, CDs everywhere. CDs had become my tribbles.
With all the clutter, I began to think it might be time to change. I could go modern and get clean by ditching my CDs by uploading them to my laptop. I could then sell my CDs and get enough money to buy an iPod and still have a couple grand in my pocket. All I would need would be a month of weekends to uploaded music and I could be a walking television commercial for the iPod!
Shockingly enough, I kept putting it off, because it not only seemed like one helluva daunting task, but I really didn't want to commit a month of my life to music conversion. So, like many other "sounds good in theory" projects, I never got around to it.
Then September 2006 happened.
It was a Thursday night (the week after I took a Friday night off from deejaying and got a spur-of-the-moment interview with TV on the Radio). Sometime around 2AM a sharp, shrieking, metal-on-metal noise woke me and my future wife. Cue the nightmare.
It was my laptop. It was dying a long, painful death. With its death went gigabyte after gigabyte of MP3s that I had uploaded or downloaded. Despite a noble and partially successful attempt to reclaim the lost data from my sputtering hard drive by a friend in IT, much of the core collection had been lost or damage.
I was determined to recover. I bought an external hard drive and backed up my music. A catastrophe of this magnitude would not happen to me again. Famous last words. Two months later, my external drive shorted out causing me to loose my backed-up digital music collection. While I had backed-up the back-up on my new laptop, any remaining thoughts of converting my music collection to digital only gone with the wind.
So that brings us to the moral of the story. I enjoy digital music, I really do. I like the remixes, the new artists and the rare tracks that are hard, if not impossible, to find on hard copy.
But I miss the rest of the experience. The album art; the joy of holding a tangible product in my hand while walking out of one of the dwindling CD shops; or the joy of coming home and seeing a package I ordered from online and ripping into it to see the latest additions to my collection.
And most importantly, I like knowing that if and when my laptop or external hard drive decides to die again, that I have to worry about far few songs being lost because I still have the original CDs or records or tapes cluttering up the place.
While I still want to have that room or basement that guys in their early twenties dream about - a room full of old music posters, old systems, old furniture and thousands of old records and CDs from bands that only a handful of people remember - maybe at some point down the line maybe I'll have a kid that will go rummaging through my CDs looking for a band that he or she has actually heard of from 30 years ago.
Regardless, I'll be able play a song and close my eyes and be at that place and time when I heard it for the first time. Who knows, maybe I'll be listening to that song on an iPod and not on the portable CD player I got from my parents for my high school graduation almost 15 years ago. Stranger things have happened. I did reference tribbles, and I never in a million years thought I'd ever make a Star Trek reference.
ipod, chuck norton, editorial, deadjournalist.com
Labels: chuck norton, deadjournalist.com, editorial, ipod
