Now I Know Why You Want To Hate Me

The iPod/iTunes hegemony is now complete.

After a year, my entire music collection has finally been categorized under the surveillance of the iTunes panopticon; not a single moment of my listening escapes its quantitative glare. My CDs have been fully imported, my music files properly labeled -- every song reified by a restricting and largely inapplicable genre tag (whenever possible, the suffix -core was added [sadcore/slowcore = lolz]). Trashy singles lurking in the shadows of my harddrive were pitilessly culled (sayonara MI:II Theme).

Just as the automobile revolutionized teenage sexuality, so too has the iPod transformed the way I consume music. Marx would have been proud.

Minor revelations:

I have started to gauge my mental health by my weekly ratio of Joy Division:New Order aural intake (I listened to the entirety of Heart and Soul last weekend, but balanced it out with some choice Low-Life and Technique cuts -- "Sunrise" is so awesome).

I don't feel like I would ever put Ladytron's "Flicking Your Switch" on any sort of all-time favorite list, but the song dominated my play-count for the better part of the year. Reciprocally, I have only listened to "Popscene" - quite possibly my favorite song by my favorite band - once in the past 12 months. Interesting? Probably only to me and my gross self-absorption.

Major revelations:

With the switch from CD player to iPod nano, I have become terribly lazy with music. Instead of listening to an album front to back, I often listen to the same song on repeat, ad nausem (ie. "Flicking") -- sometimes indulging in the terrible habit of listening to twenty seconds of a song before moving on (in the future there will only be hooks).

"What is wrong with that?" you ask.

Indeed, it is a question that stretches back to Plato's Gorgias ("Will you, who are so desirous to gratify others, afford a slight gratification to me?" -- oh Socrates, you card!), to which I would respond that I take greater pleasure in experiencing a wide palate of music. Thus, in order to combat my propensity to listen to The Hoofbeats morning night day, I have made it a goal to listen to every song in my iTunes at least once. After nine or so months, I am still only a third of the way through my collection (its Goldsmith B-I-G), but it has been worthwhile for all those deep album tracks that I overlooked in the past.

Finally (and this may sound terribly hipster of me), over the past few month I have converted to the vinyl format. Not for any pretentious audiophile reasons ("Vinyl just sounds warmer, man."), I just no longer use CDs - I rip them on my computer and then they gather dust on my shelf. In contrast to the digital form, vinyl has such a physicality to it -- which, as a materialist, I love. Plus, it is hard to be an impulse buyer of vinyl -- which, as a starving artist, my wallet loves. Time will tell if this is simply a fad and if I will appreciate my vinyl as much when I have to lug it around anywhere.