Why I (Still) Miss My iPod

It was the last great music technology that wanted your input.

22 years ago, on October 23rd, 2001, the very first iPod was introduced.

I didn’t buy one, because everything about it seemed stupid. $400 for a device capable of holding a measly thousand songs? I paid that much for my Sony Walkman back in 1980, and it lasted for thirty years and could play a limitless amount of music.

Technology, it seemed, was going backward.

I broke down in 2004 and bought the 4th generation iPod, which could hold around 5,000 songs. (Or approximately 250 cassette mix tapes, enough to fill the back seat of an ‘83 Ford Escort. Progress!)

It wasn’t the beefier storage that finally sold me on iPods. It was the curation.

I grew up in the era of mixtapes, first with cassettes and later compact discs, when you could still assemble songs without feeling like a passive listener. It wasn’t just about finding songs you loved and putting them in a precise order so that they seemed to tell a story (your story). You got to design the art and the packaging and give it a name. We were a part of the creative process!

Music legend Ian MacKaye once told me about his first experience with a mixtape, given to him by a friend. “It had never occurred to me to mix and match songs,” he said. “He put the tape in the deck in the car and suddenly we were listening to one band after another, and I finally said, ‘What is it?’ The guy handed me the cover, which he’d made; it was like a Sunday comic on one side, and the other was a handwritten list of songs. It was miraculous.”

Miraculous.

I’m not suggesting a mixtape was responsible for “Waiting Room,” but wasn’t it though?

iPods didn’t have that same sense of musical collaboration. I was just uploading songs onto a tiny robot, without any of the tactile interaction that made mixtapes so fun. Or at least that’s what I thought before I discovered metadata.

An MP3’s metadata was easily manipulated, everything from a song’s genre to the cover art. That may seem like pointless minutiae, but to a true music nerd, it was like peeking under the hood of a song and messing with the wiring.

A genre listing like “Alternative & Punk” or “Rock” didn’t tell the whole story. It lacked nuance. I preferred more descriptive (and meaningful) categories like “Androgynous Pop-Rock,” “Nasally Singer-Songwriters That I Adore Unconditionally,” and “Old White Guys Playing the Blues That Seemed More Interesting When I Was Smoking a Lot of Weed in High School.”

I would spend days—weeks sometimes—obsessively scouring the internet for the perfect cover art, usually a reproduction of a water-damaged vinyl sleeve with the Tower Records price tag still in the upper corner, or trying to decide if the Gaslight Anthem qualified as “Non-Ironic Working Class Anthems'' or “Springsteeny.” You could absolutely make an argument that this was a stupid way to spend your time. Who, after all, would notice (or care) that my iPod copy of Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones was listed as “Train Hobo Jamz” and the cover art was a Japanese import with a record store sticker written in Kanji?

I would. I noticed. And I fucking cared. That was enough. 

I resisted upgrading when new “generations” of the iPod went on the market. I once visited an Apple Store to have a cracked screen repaired and the sales guy looked at my iPod like it was Gordon Gekko’s DynaTac mobile phone in Wall Street. He called it a “Classic,” but he whispered the words like it was something I wouldn’t want my parents finding out about, like telling them that I live in a garden apartment with three other guys and spent my days reading gas station magazine porn. 

“You should think about getting an iPod Touch,” he told me, explaining its many software features like resplendent album art, apps up the wazoo, and something called a “shake shuffle,” which sounded to me like a euphemism for reading gas station magazine porn. 

“You can get up to 14,000 songs on one of these bad boys,” the sales guy explained with the fake zealousness of a tent church pastor. I tried to calculate how many cassette mix tapes stuffed into ‘83 Ford Escorts it would take to recreate that song cycle in the material world, but I couldn’t do the math.

I opted against it. I kept my (whispers) “Classic” until the bitter end. I was loyal to it like I was loyal to my Sony Walkman. It was a commitment. I was raised to believe you don’t buy a replacement for your music-playing device until you busted the shit out of that motherfucker and it was literally hanging together with duct tape.

And frankly, I wasn’t impressed with how many songs the updated models could hold. For me, the limitations were part of the iPod’s appeal. Just like a CD or cassette could only contain so many songs, you had to make your choices carefully with an iPod’s gigabytes. And that’s what made it art.

Keith Richard was interviewed recently by Howard Stern, and he talked about why Charlie Watts was such an iconic drummer. “It’s got to do with when to not hit,” he said. That’s the same philosophy behind any great mixtape. It’s not about the songs you include, it’s about the songs you don’t.

Your canvas is only so big. You might run out of blank space before you run out of paint.

I lived in fear of getting the “Low Memory Warning” on my iPod. When that happened, it was time to make hard choices. You had to completely re-evaluate the worth of every album or song in your collection, and make difficult choices that could feel like playing favorites with your kids. After one iPod ultimatum, I settled on these four genres to eliminate with extreme prejudice.

Albums That Only Have That One Song I Like

If I learned nothing else from college, it’s that I don’t want to be the guy who owns Bob Marley’s Legend. Because the guy who owns Legend can’t say he’s a fan of Bob Marley any more than somebody who hears “Stir It Up” only while shopping at Trader Joe’s can claim they’re a fan of Bob Marley. To paraphrase Ed Norton in Fight Club, “You’re a tourist.” 

That’s why the only Marley album on my iPod was Uprising. At some point, I might’ve argued that it’s Marley’s best work with the Wailers. But if I’m honest, I only owned it because of “Redemption Song.” It also had “Could You Be Loved,” which I’m not crazy about, and eight other songs that I literally have never heard. Not even once.

So what’s the difference between me and the guy who owns Legend? At least the Legend guy also has “Buffalo Soldier” and “Waiting in Vain,” and all I have is my poser pride. 

But maybe, I thought, it was time to start embracing my short attention span. Not just with Bob Marley, but every artist I’d been afraid to admit I enjoy selectively. Instead of pretending I ever make it to track two on Amy Winehouse’s Black to Black, I should pare it down to just “Rehab.” Instead of clogging up my iPod’s arteries with the Hives’ Veni Vidi Vicious—which, according to my play count, had been played in its entirety exactly zero times—I should flush out everything but “Hate To Say I Told You So.” 

Does it make me a cultural bigot that I want to dump Jay Z’s The Blueprint and just hold on to “Empire State Of Mind”? No, it makes me a realist.

Complete Artist Discographies When Come on, Who Am I Kidding?

Like anybody who hoards music, I can be obsessive and unreasonable. There’s no good reason to own as many Wilco bootlegs as I do, especially since most of the songs are (at this point) in triplicate. While “Tell the Mermaid” is not something that got a lot of play on my iPod, the only way you could separate me from my Soul Coughing rarities was by prying them out of my cold, dead hands. 

But there are some artists—most artists, in fact—who didn’t need to be represented quite so thoroughly. Like most people, I went through a hardcore Radiohead phase for a few years, but when the man-crush on Thom Yorke disappears (and it always does), it’s not rocket science to figure out that OK Computer, In Rainbows, and maybe Kid A are the only necessary albums. (Don’t be one of those people who argues for Amnesiac. Just don’t.) 

Most of Beck’s albums are essential, but maybe not so much Stereopathetic Soul Manure. (Except “Satan Gave Me a Taco,” and then see Rule #1.) And while I have nothing but affection for the dearly departed White Stripes, you really only need one of their albums to get the basic idea. Listen to White Blood Cells and it’s like listening to everything they’ve ever recorded, but in an eighth of the gigabytes.

Albums I Only Own Because I Feel Like I Should

I’m not proud of it, but I’ve gotten drunk and read Pitchfork reviews. And whenever that happens, I inevitably end up buying albums that, 98% of the time, I’ll realize the next day are unlistenable.

To their credit, Pitchfork has introduced me to some amazing bands, like Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire. But they’ve also tricked me into buying Deerhunter’s Halycon Digest, which is the musical equivalent of a chloroform-soaked rag. 

My iPod was bursting at the seams with albums that Pitchfork and used record store employees with horned-rimmed glasses talked me into, like Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender and Panda Bear’s Person Pitch. So why didn’t I get rid of them long ago? Because I’d been waiting for the day when somebody I didn’t know and maybe found physically attractive looked at my iPod and saw that I owned Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender and Panda Bear’s Person Pitch and assumed that I must be clever and sexually desirable. 

I knew it could happen because I did it all the time to other people. I’d been on airplanes and glanced down at the iPod of the person sitting next to me and made snap judgments about their personality/ intelligence/ sexual desirability based on their music. I once sacrificed control of the armrest because I noticed the guy next to me on a flight was listening to Olivia Tremor Control and I felt intimidated. It’s the fear of being judged by strangers that kept Daniel Johnson and The Fiery Furnaces on my iPod for almost a decade.

Artists and Albums Not Worth the Social Embarrassment

I used to have nightmares about my funeral. Not because I’d be dead, but because I was pretty sure I’d forget to make a funeral playlist. Whoever my surviving relatives were, it was unlikely they’d have the emotional energy to slog through my overstuffed iPod and make educated guesses. Instead, they’d just hit shuffle—a SHAKE SHUFFLE, perhaps—and hope for the best. And that’s how, in the middle of what should be a tearful and regret-filled goodbye, my friends and family would be assaulted with Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful.” Or the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow,” which I didn’t even remember putting on there. Maybe, while I was alive, I only enjoyed them ironically, but it’s too late and I’m too dead to defend myself. 

And when those songs start blaring through the church, there’s going to be a lot of very confused and angry faces, and a lot of people muttering, “Oh Jesus Christ, really?” That’s the question iPods made us confront. Are the guilty musical pleasures of today worth the risk of having your funeral ruined by the Dave Matthews Band tomorrow? It’s the same reason you always make sure you’re wearing clean underwear before getting in a car, and erase all the porn from your Google search history before leaving the house. Death can come at any moment, and if you’re not prepared for it, your final farewell could very well be John Mayer’s “Your Body Is A Wonderland.”

So yeah. That, in a very overly-explained nutshell, is why I miss iPods. And the weird thing is, I used to think they’d be the death of music. iPods were killing proper mixtapes, and cutting us out of the relationship with our favorite songs entirely. But in hindsight, they were the last of the devices that made us, the fans, the avid listeners, feel like we mattered.

Spotify is a streaming succubus, offering everything and nothing. You can have ALL THE MUSIC THAT EVER EXISTED (except the really good stuff, which still has to be hunted and gathered like our ancestors looking for food.) When was the last time you made a Spotify playlist and felt like you did something? Never. That never fucking happened. A Spotify playlist is filling out paperwork at the DMV. There’s no soul. The algorithm doesn’t want your fucking input, man. It knows what you want, so just shut up and listen.

I still have my old iPod. I’ve carried its corpse like some people hold on to the ashes of their parents. I know I should throw it away. But I’m not ready to do that yet. I still like music that I can touch, that needs me more than I need it.