Thursday, October 13, 2005

iPod love - part 2

I have been doing rather lot of driving on the same stretch of M6 recently and consequently my brain is in overdrive as it disengages with the actual road signeage.
Back to the iPod - I was thinking of the analogy of pot-pourri, but a pot-pourri where each and every distinct scented fragment transports you somewhere absolutely now - the school hymn book, your grandmothers house, your mother's embrace.
One of the compelling but potentially dangerous aspects of the iPod is its capacity to hold literally thousands of pieces of music that have a direct and powerful emotional effect on you - all available (and discard-able) within a millisecond. Think of the music that transports you back to your teenage years, to school or to heartbreak. Think of how rarely most of us encountered that music before. Maybe while screeling through a radio dial in a hired car, or at a friends wedding, and remember how viscerally it affected you.
Like many I am sure, I have filled the little beast with only the creme de la creme of my musical taste, scouring the Web for downloads "christ, Magazine - I haven't hear that since I was 15!") and consequently it's now like a quietly ticking bomb, a genies lamp.
What does the iPod's ability to fast-track us to the most heightened emotional states of our lives do? I find myself on perpetual 'shuffle' mode, gorging on successive memories at 95mph on the motorway, then skipping ruthlessly through the opening bars of dozens of them thinking 'Christ, not Magazine again!'

1 comment:

Guthro Tull said...

Very true, very true ... But photographs have been performing the same job through the eyes technically since 1826, if the University of Texas website is anything to go by. The iPod is fun, just as going through old photos can be fun, if fun means initially intoxicating but short on anything other than a backward-looking shot in the arm.