The Minds Ipod
The mind's iPod
Wednesday, 18 May 2005
I wasn't going to jump on the bandwagon, honestly. "They're just another piece of useless techno junk, I said. "That fad will pass", I said.
But then there was a special deal on iPods, and so Apple's marketing coup of the 21st century had me in. Fresh out of its box, the gleaming white tablet blinked expectantly at me.
"I've got thirty giggle-bites, it whirred.
"Ooh, I had better use them", I said.
"I rather think you better had", it would have replied, except its screen had gone to sleep.
My CD collection shuddered. They were, all five or six hundred of them, to be Ripped! Their digitised souls sucked off the plastic and into the white tablet. Would I still take them out from time to time, open up their little square booklets, smell the glossy paper?
"I'd like to think so", I told them.
I started with the Beatles " where else? " then came the Beach Boys and Pink Floyd and Billy Joel and Dire Straits and REM and U2 and Crowded House. All the stuff I would hide if Nick Cave came round to my house.
The great thing about the iPod is that once you have Ripped an album it goes into a library of songs from which, in shuffle mode, your friendly i-DJ selects the soundtrack to your day. Which is where my tricksy title comes in.
For there I am at the wheel, looking down the length of a fine Melbourne traffic jam wondering what I can do to avoid doing the washing up upon getting home (like ripping more CDs, then creating a playlist for my wife " she'll be so happy I did that instead of the washing up), when something issues from deep within my iSock (a patentable use for odd socks belonging to those too stingy to pay for a case for their iPods). It flashes up the cable, into the car stereo, out the speakers, into my ears and then into a computer with many more than thirty giggle-bites.
It's a song I haven't heard for years, and it jolts my brain.
'A Pillow Of Winds' was recorded by Pink Floyd for the album 'Meddle' in the early seventies, just before they got Huge. It's an appropriate title for a tune that is all gentle finger-picking acoustic guitar, dreamy slide guitar and lyrics about lying with your love by your side and she's breathing low.
So then I'm in the traffic, and I'm out of it. It's somewhere deep in the early Nineties and I'm deep in a hammock with headphones on when I should be writing my physics CAT. I do want to be a doctor, don't I?
Family holidays when you're seventeen. Hmmm. Money has been paid to transport your spotty frame to the tropics, and, to misquote Billy Joel, All You Wanna Do Is Dissociate. Be somewhere else.
That's why I think so many of my fellow spotty youths went through the Pink Floyd phase - it's music so rich in production you can lose yourself in the layers of sound, but unlike similarly rich orchestral music, it's got the rock hooks a kid can access. My little brother was tween at the time in question, and would put the headphones on and make faces. "That's for tossers", he declared. This from the boy who in five years' time would pinch my entire Pink Floyd collection for his own dissociative needs. I tried protesting to my father, but he reminded me I'd pinched them off him in the first place.
So 'A Pillow Of Winds' would lift me out of the hammock, away from Year 12 and family, and lay me down in the presence of some magical being (a girl) in some magical place (wherever the girl was, and her mother wasn't). Why do Pink Floyd songs go for eight minutes? Because you want them to go forever.
Apparently people used to smoke marijuana in their bean bags to these tunes. Well, at that stage I could spell marijuana (in The Queen's English it's got an aitch), but all I was inhaling was sea air, with the tang of salt and seaweed.
The Pink Floyd phase lasted into the Uni years, when I discovered normative post-adolescence, as best accompanied by Nine Inch Nails and Tori Amos. Music was no longer for dissociating, but for staring (apparently earth-shattering) woes in the face and howling with normative post-adolescent…ness. Interestingly, I haven't Ripped any of this music to my iPod yet. Somehow the idea of i-DJ segueing from 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' into 'March Of The Pigs' lacks that white-tablet smoothness.
But, you know, I should put it all on. Because a decade and one good long Crowded House Phase later, I'm a Grown Up. I like Edith Piaf, and Bach, and gardening, and Billy Joel again. And there was something beautiful about sitting in the traffic and smelling salt and seaweed...
I have about three thousand songs on the iPod so far, of which several hundred may take me somewhere long ago and deeply felt, if muted by the layers piled on since. Where's i-DJ going to go next? I say bring it on, weird little white thing!
By Dr Frigmund Pseud