[I started writing this entry on my phone last year, trying to relieve the boredom of an airport lounge. I couldn't get GPRS access at the time, so I forgot about it. Hey ho. It's still relevant.]
Adding a few rules to tighten up my “everything random” playlist in iTunes the other day, I started thinking about how my music listening habits have changed over the years.
I started to get an idea of my musical tastes at 12/13, gravitating towards the louder, hairier bands on Top of the Pops. However, my scope for musical gratification was limited. I could afford to buy only the occasional record or tape, and otherwise had to rely on birthdays, Christmas or the local library’s meagre selection of rock and metal singles. As a result, my musical awareness was restricted to isolated songs by a handful of artists.
As a teenager, starting to explore beyond this rock/metal starting point, the album became my unit of musical currency. Listening to just one track, even one side, was unheard of; it would be a CRIME AGAINST MUSIC not to listen to the whole album right through. I could probably recite the tracklisting for every album I owned ;-)
With a small group of friends (and in contrast to most of the kids at school) I spent hours browsing Lincoln’s secondhand record stores, unravelling music history and the complex system of influences that led to the sound of my favourite bands. We usually arrived at school clutching bags of records under our arms… borrowing and lending kept things moving, stopping the process of musical discovery from becoming stale. Budgeting for blank cassettes was vital… remember the “home taping is killing music” warnings on record sleeves? It didn’t, and I suspect downloading won’t, either.
Fast forward a decade… in my 20s, earning money and living in London, there were now fewer limits to my musical exploration. The medium had changed (CD replacing vinyl and cassette) and my tastes were even broader than before, but things were still pretty much the same. I bought albums by artists I liked and listened to them in one go. However, I was having trouble keeping up with all the music I wanted to listen to, and as a result, several obsessions of previous years were all but forgotten.
Another ten-year hop in the time machine, and we’re up to the present day. One particular technological development has changed my listening habits in several ways…
Attached to this Mac is a 250 gigabyte external hard drive, named “Media”. I use it for digital photos, videos, scans and… MP3s! I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to sound quality, so I only encode mp3s at high bitrates (320 or 256kbps) because I have more than enough disk space to do so. Almost all of my CD collection is there, always available for instant access, and here’s the really good bit that I’d never have envisaged ten years ago… it can be RANDOMISED. Although I still buy whole albums on CD and listen to them as single musical units, I’m guessing that the majority of my listening involves setting iTunes to randomise absolutely everything on a track-by-track basis.
See what’s happened? I’m right back to where I started at the age of twelve… the song is my unit of musical currency. Lots of songs really work well in the flow of a whole album, but they can often work even *better* when framed by totally unrelated sounds. It wouldn’t be unusual for me to hear Opeth followed by Thomas Tallis followed by Djelimady Tounkara. And unlike ten years ago, I finally feel like I’m on top of things musically. I might not know every second of every album, but at least I’m not neglecting huge piles of CDs any more.
Now, here’s what’s weird. If you saw the ads for Apple’s iPod Shuffle last year, you’ll know that “Life is Random”. Now, while I use my full-size iPod for a mixture of random and standard listening, I use my little Shuffle very differently. For me, it’s a way of applying restriction and limitation to the vastness of musical possibility, focusing my ears on just one artist. I’ll usually fill it up with five or six albums by one artist and listen to the whole lot sequentially. In this case, the musical unit is the artist’s career, or at least a decent chunk of it. Life *is* random, but sometimes it’s nice to pick a thread and follow it through to the end.