Not being Miss Technology, I took until this summer to succumb to the iPod craze – and that in its smallest and cheapest form, solely in order to be able to listen to soothing things on the flight to visit Berenike. I hate flying, and Fr Z’s ‘podcazts’ and FSSP sermons looked like the way forward. Back in Britain, I thought I might as well have a go at the white headphones look, which seems to be almost uniformly sported by commuters these days. (Come to think of it, if the cybermen were planning a take-over, infiltrating iTunes would probably be the way to go – never mind those weird earplug things on Doctor Who in the last series but one. Anyway.) I was going to say, the white headphones look like all the Cool Kids, but apparently the iPod ceased to be cool in 2004.
Never having got into the Walkman thing either, I found walking down the street with music in my ears bizarre, and bizarre in an unexpected way. Didn’t they used to advertise iPods as things to let you ‘create your own soundtrack’? Well, that’s not a good thing. Life doesn’t have a soundtrack – or rather, not one you choose; and it’s only afterwards you realise what the soundtrack was. Like the way that mid-nineties pop music makes me feel nostalgic about secondary school, even though I didn’t listen to any of it voluntarily at the time. Or the (more predictable) way that Anglican choral music conjures up the college chapel, buttered crumpets, gowns, and choir socials.
Walking up the road with music filling the ears imposes a soundtrack where one has not yet been formed. What did fiddle music have to do with the trot up to my old flat to move boxes? That was odd. Worse, it can bend time by making one soundtrack collide with another. Walking along to a certain Divine Comedy song suddenly brought certain events of June 2001 into the middle of autumn 2007, and moved them from Oxford to Edinburgh. It was indeed as if someone had got the film rights to my life and completely rewritten the story. The iPod’s staying at home now.
Entirely unconnectedly: the DVD of My So-Called Life was much reduced in HMV, so I invested. I’d forgotten how amazing it was. For the sake of intergenerational understanding, it should be compulsory regular viewing. The horror of being, like, fifteen, and of being a fifteen-year-old’s parents, has never been so, like, well depicted.
EDIT: My iPod is revenged upon me. The little thingumy that connects it to the computer has broken!
November 8, 2007 at 5:17 am
Takeover by the cybermen is right. I feel sorry for people on the bus listening with glazed eyes to their headsets. They are missing out on their own thoughts, flicking back and forth like goldfish, and on the comforting real-life noise of the city. I hate this modern habit of drowning out life and silence with recorded music. I rarely listen to the stuff, and when I do, I try to do it with attention, not while multi-tasking.
November 8, 2007 at 10:20 am
How did you break it so quickly!? Awwww… go get a replacement; it’ll still be under guarantee.
I do like my iPod, but often only listen to the spoken word (the ones you listed, and some others, e.g. BBC News). It’s also useful for me, to listen to music quietly at work whilst repetitive computer work.
I try not to listen to it in the street, though.
November 8, 2007 at 12:23 pm
There must be something particularly potent about mid-nineties pop music which also has a powerful emotional nostalgic effect on me. Anglican choral music however drips with oily insincerity. It conjures up the image of non-believing college chaplains smugly contemplating their imminent dinner and their comfortable place in the establishment and choirs entirely composed of atheist hedonists (with one token earnest female Scot) plotting their latest European tour/orgy while playing spot the double entendre in Cranmer’s psalms. It funny that all Oxford Choirs of which I know had one earnest female Scot in them it must be some kind of rule…
November 8, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Our choir was a funny mixture – several earnest people (Prot, Catholic and one dogmatic atheist) who all got really annoyed by the sermons from different angles.
November 14, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I think I only once walked through the streets with (not an iPod, but something cheaper) in my ears, and that in Vienna. Spending there three days entirely on my own, having the company of my own thoughts for the whole day, I felt justified in doing so when walking to my abode (in a monastary directly adjacent to the Belvedere) at night, when it was cold, dark, and mostly rainy. But somehow the soundtrack fitted. As I started to listen to the same music on the same spot walking the same way on three consecutive days, I can now neither listen to those songs without seeing the Opera, the Soviet warrior’s monument, or the Belvedere, in front of my inner eye, nor could I, presumably, walk there without hearing the music. And yet I quite like the connection.