like a pig rolling in shit

minikomi

pu1.pu2.wav.noi
it just seems like a strange article to write. like someone writing about all the amazing quick to prepare hot foods they've been eating lately because they recently bought a microwave or something.

i wasnt really into chocolate pudding until recently, but now its so easy to prepare, i find myself eaiting it lots!
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
minikomi said:
it just seems like a strange article to write. like someone writing about all the amazing quick to prepare hot foods they've been eating lately because they recently bought a microwave or something.

i!

yeah it's all about his playback gadgets

it confirms my prejudice against iPods, the way it's often these people who've lost interest in music -- and the device allows them to recover their passion for it (which is fine, jolly good show) but in this bizarre accumulative/amassing way in which all the original point of their passsion for specific instances of music gets somehow lost

that's brought out here by the way the piece starts and ends w/ the Clash -- in the first bit it's about him as an art student, the music blaring out people's rooms at the dorm -- all different kinds of music -- the partisanship and the passion is hinted at --- you get a faint sense of what it meant to be a believer in the Clash, all the expectation and awaiting for the Second Album

and then the piece goes back to the Clash , but in the present -- how he heard a track from Give Em Enough Rope "in Woolworths"

lost in the supermarket of Sound

that's what i kind of felt about the end to Morley's Words and Music... it's supposed to be this utopian image of sound unbounded.... with this odd non-Morleyesque tone, that oddly reminded me of
Mondo 2000 or Wired, or Sadie Plant's Zeroes and Ones... early 90s-ish techno-philia...
yet what he's constructing as his image of future sonic paradise resembles a megastore... or perhaps the interior of an iPod ...

an Onan-iverse of Sound
 
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Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
blissblogger said:
it confirms my prejudice against iPods, the way it's often these people who've lost interest in music
I'm a Mac freak and a music obsessive with disposable and I listen to maybe half my music via iTunes and I am, therefore, the perfect iPod customer... but I haven't got one. It never quite appealed enough.

But over the last year I've bought less new music than at any time since I was 10. I spend more on music as presents for other people than for me.

And tonight, before reading this, I pretty much decided I was getting an iPod.

Maybe DubVendor, Soundquake and Gladdy's will benefit from my 200 quid instead.

However: "but in this bizarre accumulative/amassing way in which all the original point of their passsion for specific instances of music gets somehow lost"
Isn't this what you call "being a DJ", or possibly, "growing up"? And might it be that one is not so much losing the original point of the passion, as transcending it? Wasn't there a bit of that in RIUaSA? Wouldn't an iPod stuffed with all the best music covered in RIUaSA be fantastic? Especially if you played in in your stereo while doing the washing up...

* note: I believe Matt has an iPod, indeed that he's had one since their inception. This may represent an empirical flaw in your argument :)
 
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mpc

wasteman
i don't really know what to make of the article. i sincerely doubt he'd often "wait up until midnight to listen to John Peel".

--

"when the record shop finally had a copy of the disc you wanted, you'd scurry down there, cash in hand, returning home (having read the sleeve notes three or four times on the bus) to place the thing on the record deck. And if you were me, you'd play it until you liked it."

haha. reminds me of when i was young(er).

--

what do people actually think of Rufus Wainwright?

--

i guess mentioning Coldplay quite so many times loses the article a certain amount of kudos.
 
mpc said:
--

"when the record shop finally had a copy of the disc you wanted, you'd scurry down there, cash in hand, returning home (having read the sleeve notes three or four times on the bus) to place the thing on the record deck. And if you were me, you'd play it until you liked it."

haha. reminds me of when i was young(er).

yes, me too. that's part of what I liked about it. I can see a lot of myself in there! plus I've been known to roll around in shit myself quite a lot. big-up tha shit-rollazzzz!!!!
 
plus, everyone should have an iPod! I mainly buy music on vinyl at the moment, but I still wouldn't be without it. Suckin' down all those MP3 mixes/Rinse FM sets, blasting them in the car twenty minutes later, or cranked-up on the hip whilst mowing the lawn etc. And frankly I wouldn't feel comfortable leaving the house without BoC's entire back catalogue nestling in my pocket. iPods are fucking great. Get with the program you fucking luddites.
 
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soundslike1981

Well-known member
It may seem like a minor quibble, but I dislike iPods mainly because of the control they take out of your hands.

My mp3 player (100GB behemoth) has given me a similarly revelatory/revelling feeling--but primarily because it allows me to undertake an appreciation of the collection I've built over the years that sacrifices neither breadth nor depth to the other. Putting it on random has helped me hear things I hadn't thought to pull out in years; but the quantity of music it can hold and its always-with me have allowed me to spend much more time giving a fairly concentrated listen to things. Sure, there's the risk of turning eclecticism into "wallpaper music"--always there, with no attention given (and I kind of enjoy wallpapering my music, at the office). But I feel like I'm experiencing my collection more fully than I ever could've before--and it hasn't caused me to stop spending time doing nothing but listening to music by taking away the rituals (however small they'd become) of putting on a CD/record. The fact that I've had to take the time to rip thousands of albums and organise them has forced/allowed me to take stock in a way that to which I can't really see any downsides.

I admit there's something slightly foreign and almost creepy to me that someone could a) lose their passion for music and b) have it rekindled by a gadget. But why does it make my joy over my own gadget any better that I never lost the passion, and that the gadget has only made it easier to fully integrate into my life?
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
Nick Gutterbreakz said:
or cranked-up on the hip whilst mowing the lawn etc

that's the only justification for having an ipod -- and since i don't have a lawn to mow, i don't need an ipod

really, since i moved to nyc and stopped driving a car, i haven't listened to urban hip hop r'n'b radio -- which has been my loss

but yeah, the automobile and the radio -- commercial, college, community, pirate -- are the perfect fit in my book

however, i see no purpose to walking down the street or sitting on the subway with ipod or walkman
 

soundslike1981

Well-known member
Much as I love the "music" of a city, I have to admit sometimes it's a great feeling to walk around hearing great music--combining so many of my favourite things all into one moment. But that doesn't make it "good," I guess--and I can see the argument that it's one more way of fragmenting everyone into "scenes" of one. I've had the fortune, living in a small city, not to really come across any sort of iPod "culture" (show me yours I'll show you mine, etc.) that I've read about in weird newspaper articles. Music is sort of the one thing I'll happily allow to infect other realms of life. . . but I admit the importance I give to music probably makes me sick (and makes this place and places like it either a hospital, a crackhouse, or an AA meeting).
 
dominic said:
that's the only justification for having an ipod -- and since i don't have a lawn to mow, i don't need an ipod

really, since i moved to nyc and stopped driving a car, i haven't listened to urban hip hop r'n'b radio -- which has been my loss

but yeah, the automobile and the radio -- commercial, college, community, pirate -- are the perfect fit in my book

however, i see no purpose to walking down the street or sitting on the subway with ipod or walkman


Hmmm...I guess us dad-blogger types,with wifes/kidz/commitments (who don't listen to music as part of their job like the Blissblogga) aren't always able to sit and listen undisturbed under the conditions we'd like. I grab my listening time wherever I can, including whilst mowing the lawn (true dad-blogga activity, innit). The iPod is an extremely efficient tool for facilitating that.
 

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
dominic said:
however, i see no purpose to walking down the street or sitting on the subway with ipod or walkman

What's wrong with wanting to lsiten to music while moving around?
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
the ipod seems to be yet another way for the industry to sell back catalogue for the umpteenth time in a new format. at least thats how its marketed in articles like this. if it took a new piece of technology for the author to get interested in music again, then no doubt he will lose interest again as soon as the ipod loses its novelty.
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
On the London tube yesterday:

A 19 or so old year very fit (sixpack and all) girl, see-through linen trousers,
no shirt, just a black bikini top, big shades. Super confident.
In her lap: a lime-green Zen Micro MP3-player.

Her attitude and shades saying: "you can look at me - but know that I am looking
at YOU sad fuckers behind my sunglasses. you have an iPod? you are an even
sadder middle-aged fucker!"
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
yeah meme i know lots of iPod-owning exceptions to the lapsed fan rediscovering music through IPod but it is quite a common syndrome

dominic said:
the automobile and the radio -- commercial, college, community, pirate -- are the perfect fit in my book

we went out of town recently which i always like doing as it's the only time we rent a car and get to experience the Great American Radio Experience -- in that context all kinds of thing i wouldn't normally listen i find myself digging -- like 'rock me like a hurricane' by the scorpions --

that's the other thing i don't like about the iPod -- it's like Radio Me -- but the whole point of real radio is that about the collective and the connective -- shared experience -- and also the possibilty of surprise, of being confronted by stuff you didn't know you'd like -- or indeed stuff you DON'T like

(iPoddies are always gurgling about 'my ipod seems to understand what i wanted to hear next, it went from X to Y to Z, incredible' -- duh, that's because you're the playlist programmer at Radio Me)

the wife has an iPod actually, it has rekindled her lapsed enjoyment of music somewhat -- i've borrowed it now and then, on long journeys -- i can see the point of it here, as a sort of uber-Walkman w/o having to lug around 500 C90s

but then i was never that big a fan of the walkman -- again, alleviating the tedium of long journeys, great -- although there's an irony that the places they're most useful are places where the background noise is so loud - tube, rail, bus, airplane -- you have to turn it up to deafening levels to even halfway hear it proper

but the thing of walking around the city cocooned in your own private soundtrack -- i've never seen the appeal really -- i like to be exposed to the city's own noise and bustle not shielded from it

the one exception i can think of -- going across London w/ a C90 of Loop' s heaven's end and the thief of fire ep -- with the wah-wah overload it was like walking through a city in flames -- apocalyptic -- that was cool
 
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minikomi

pu1.pu2.wav.noi
when i first got my minidisc in japan i walked in the snow covered countryside to a soundtrack of oval, fennesz, kevin drumm, and pole. it was bliss.
 

juliand

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
but then i was never that big a fan of the walkman -- again, alleviating the tedium of long journeys, great -- although there's an irony that the places they're most useful are places where the background noise is so loud - tube, rail, bus, airplane -- you have to turn it up to deafening levels to even halfway hear it proper

but the thing of walking around the city cocooned in your own private soundtrack -- i've never seen the appeal really -- i like to be exposed to the city's own noise and bustle not shielded from it

I'm reminded of the "postmodern" scene at the beginning of Homi Bhabha's 'Postmodernism/Postcolonialism':

"Roller bladers, garland yourselves with Sony Walkmans; power walkers, bedeck yourself with boom boxes, and set out to meet the world. Shrouded in circles of self-selected sounds, scream loudly if you must speak or are spoken to, for it is no easy thing to penetrate these protective skins that form "personalized" public spheres."

These self-selected spheres, for Bhabha, are counterposed by the mise en abyme effect of postmodern architecture--all polished aluminum and sheet glass. Though iTunes sometimes feels the same way: the hall of mirrors.

To follow on Bhabha, as well as Simon's point about "shields", is separation/immersion always narcotic? For me, listening to music IS public--is at least potentially a social act, a kind of attention enabled by the cocoon, by the slight separation from the present world enabled by these devices

And surely the "city's own noise" is at least something of a romantic idea, a memory of a time when "city space" was less circumscribed and routinized, less abstract.

There may also be the mitigating point that often I listen to radio sets as I travel about--detached from their original source, but full of the "public address" you prize, Simon--taking me back to days of cassette Walkmans, when I'd tape stuff off the radio constantly
 
blissblogger said:
that's the other thing i don't like about the iPod -- it's like Radio Me --

I love Radio Me.

blissblogger said:
(iPoddies are always gurgling about 'my ipod seems to understand what i wanted to hear next, it went from X to Y to Z, incredible' -- duh, that's because you're the playlist programmer at Radio Me)

But isn't that refering to the shuffle feature, where it's just randomly playing stuff? I think most people will have a fairly varied collection of tunes on their iPod, sometimes stuff you forgot you had on there, or things you downloaded but forgot to listen to. When you've got 4,000+ tunes on there, it's surprising how often you think 'huh? what the hell is this?'. Shuffle feature is full of surprises, believe me!
 
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