'He’s a friend,' says a mate.  'He walks everywhere…!'  The claims garner little interest from a throng of gathered women.

'.. And he still uses minidisks,' adds my former chum to great laughter and an inescapable sense of group pity.

Obscure personal music devices, it seems, have now clearly become the highest form of wit, but my thoughts turn to a halcyon time when all music fans were equal; a time before the highly stylised plastic box, that accursed I-pod, entered our lives. 

Back then, I suppose, we were pioneers of a sort, and, like all great innovators, many of us came across digital music for the best of all reasons – it was free.  Sites like Napster, Kazaa and possibly thousands of potentially morally dubious web pages offered a treasure trove of the latest, oldest, most awful and generally obscure music available.  If music be the food of love, then file ‘sharing’ was one limitless supply of rare and long-forgotten porn; however, it was hardly a relationship in the truest sense of the word, not like one could have with vinyl, cassette or CD.

 

So don’t think this simply a rant of someone too tight to pay for downloads over the Internet – I mean it is a factor – but besides my inability to afford one of those flashy little I-pods, my concern is really over what they represent.

For their owners, the I-pod seem to be a portal to the latest music, bearing the digitally and socially maligned, served up with convenient user-friendly controls and sickly-sweet pastel colours.  Perhaps then, as part of a dwindling brethren of minidisk users, I am missing the point about I-pods and I-tunes.

But music, especially the inescapable human preoccupation of loving albums and singles, shouldn’t always be about convenience.  What about the crap that music collecting entails; discovering a rare and cherished album in the bargain bin of record shops, or more importantly, what about record shops?  Sure, you can get full screen colour and a snazzy control wheel, and sometime soon even the Beatles back catalogue, but what the hell are I-tunes users supposed to do with HMV vouchers?

The selectivity of I-tunes will soon lead us editing music collections to variations on the same greatest hits albums, consigning Rocky Racoon and hosts of other ‘filler’ material to the recycle bins on Windows.  In our digital age, Radiohead needn’t have bothered putting out all those albums that you may or may not like.  After all who needs the inconvenience of it all?  So I guess that’s my issue; it's all a little too convenient.

At a recent party, a very good friend of mine, culturally astute enough to be able to perform single fifteen minute impressions of the character Short-round from The Temple of Doom, opened up his I-tunes to reveal a quite frankly brilliant collection of music.  Heading inadvisably straight for a collection of Led Zeppelin songs, the owner surprisingly asked me what we were listening to.

 

'No Quarter,' I replied as if I had just discovered the new world, 'Don’t you listen to your own music collection?'

'Nah,' he replied ambivalently. 'There’s a load of my dad’s stuff on there that I don’t bother with.'  Overblown rock classics, it seems, just aren’t very convenient.

For as much as people resist, the I-pod, much like Khaki trousers and Nigella Lawson, will no doubt claim us all at some point in our lives.  In doing so, the charms of its full colour-screen may doubtless send our much loved music collections to appreciative car boot sales.  But surely a stand now needs to be taken against the cultural blitzkrieg of the I-pod and I-tunes.

Don’t get me wrong, the internet, not least for giving everyone access to Terry Wogan’s Floral Song at the touch of a button, has been a good thing, but your personal music device shouldn’t be the same as your record collection.

A series of records is at the very least an account of the general inconvenience of our lives be they reflected by Disorder or Dancing Queen.  Mistakes are likely to be made, but how else is Dannii Minogue going to flog records?  Sure, you have the odd indelible physical stain in the record collection, but much like in life itself, you have to take the rough with the smooth.

Posted In Features, Jan 25 2009. Words - Neil