One thing about me is, I hate music.
To clarify: music and I, we don’t have a very healthy relationship — not anymore, anyway.
I’m one of the only people I know who doesn’t identify as a “music lover.” Even though I do find some music highly pleasurable, it’s really not something I celebrate, or take pride in, or like to share with others, or personally identify with — it’s not something that I devote a lot of brainpower to. My music listening life is riddled with guilt and shame, a lot of sick pleasure and emotional avoidance. I use music like an illegal drug, not like the wholesome, nourishing meals that it’s meant to be. It’s just bad. As my regular readers know, music, tbh, stresses me out, more than anything else, and I feel like I’d be better off without it.
But it hasn’t always been this way.
For my shitty relationship with music, I myself am mostly to blame, because I am, to put it simply, a terrible person (how could someone who hates music not be a terrible person, right?!). I’d say I’m 95% at fault here. If I were less lazy, if I exerted more effort to be better… but, there’s that remaining five percent: I think there are other, external factors that are also responsible for the rift between music and Mith.
One of these reasons is technological advancement, which hastened the death of my dear friend Clarence.
Ah, Clarence Phineas McLoughlin: a flower too soon faded. A hero fallen. Who, you ask, was Clarence, and what does he have to do with technology or music?! To clarify:
.
Another thing about me is, I’m not an Apple person. No iPhones, no iPad, no iAnything. I don’t own any Apple products, not anymore, and actually don’t vibe with their interface at all (although I do have fond memories of those transparent-shelled monitors from the early 2000s; I still remember how exciting it was when my elementary school library replaced their plain old boxy gray computers with the futuristic see-through blue ones that looked like candy! Ah, the thrill of the y2k era. If only we’d had foresight.).
However, there was once one Apple product that was, imo, worth the exorbitant price tag, and which I wish they’d bring back, and that was: the iPod.
Marvelous little thing, the iPod. Technology should have stopped there. “We’ve done it! We’ve completed music listening devices, we’ve completed cell phones. Now let’s move on to curing cancer.”
I was sixteen or seventeen when I got an iPod. (Friggen autocorrect keeps trying to change it to “iPad” — fie upon thee, autocorrect! Have some respect for your elders!) Might have been a seventeenth birthday present, now that I think about it. My family couldn’t afford the regular iPod so I was given an iPod Nano. A little plain white one. I loved him. Being a weirdo, when my iTunes application on the old family desktop computer told me to “name my iPod,” I named him not something obvious like “ipod nano” or “Mith’s iPod,” but rather chose to dignify him with the legal name of Clarence Phineas McLoughlin. Although he always just went by Clarence.
Up until Clarence, I had always listened to CDs, as we all did in those days. CDs were great. I miss CDs. I miss CD stores, I miss hearing a great song on the radio and begging my mom to take me to the CD store ASAP to buy it with my allowance money — that was the only way, back then, to acquire that song! I’m even nostalgic for the anxiety I’d get, worrying about the CD store clerk judging my taste in music, lol! I miss wondering if the rest of the album would be as good as the one or two songs that I’d heard. I miss the little pop-click of loading a CD into my walkman, and the inky smell of the fresh CD jacket. I’d sit there with the new disc playing in my headphones, checking out the jacket art (look at what the artist made for me!) (back before social media, when musicians and celebrities were like otherworldly figures, cloaked in mystery and intrigue!) and reading the lyrics and making note of which track numbers I liked and which ones I’d be skipping. But then sometimes you just let the thing play, and the weaker tracks start to grow on you, and you start to appreciate the album for a whole complete work, like a symphony.
With Clarence, that started to change, but I still enjoyed albums because it was still pretty convenient. I loaded all my old CDs onto Clarence, bought some albums on iTunes, listened to whole albums on Clarence — but also began to get more scattered about it, now that I could make my own playlists and employ the “Shuffle” function. Things were beginning to fall apart, I admit — but if we had stopped there, things might have been better. That was the last time I had a good relationship with music. Through Clarence.
The iPod was a happy medium between CDs and the modern world of Spotify and smartphones. It was still pro-artist, pro-album, pro-art. You hear a song you like on the radio, you log onto the Internet on your family PC and go check out the album on iTunes, listening to the thirty-second clips of each track, and if it’s good, you buy it for $9.99 (with digital jacket art that Clarence showed on his little screen as the song played!), and upload it to your iPod — the new CD shopping, minus the social anxiety. Pretty much perfect.
I miss albums.
I know some people, the music lovers out there, still go out of their way to purchase entire albums. Not I. It’s no longer necessary. It’s too inconvenient anymore. Now, I hear a song I like on the radio, I just add it to a YouTube playlist, and that’s that. I don’t have patience or energy to deep-dive into entire artists anymore.
It used to be that, because I had to pay $10-20 for a CD, I’d only buy music that I actually respected and believed to be worth my money, of which I’ve never had much. I never bought any hip-hop or rap CDs (unless you count Linkin Park/Jay-Z’s Collision Course, which was like my gateway drug).
YouTube is free — with ads.
So, I pretty much exclusively listen to assorted little bits of mainstream junk, now, mostly hip-hop. With ads.
By the time Clarence died, the age of the smartphone was upon us, the ephemeral age of the iPod already in the past. In a way, my love of music died along with Clarence.
I fully admit that I am to blame here. The advancement of technology only rots your brain if you were a weak-minded person to begin with. Brilliant people still exist today, and use technology as a tool rather than letting it use them. I’m not one of those people. I’m just another complicit zombie loser (why did autocorrect try to change that to “lover”?! Ffs! See?! Smartphones suck!) who’s allowed a piece of her soul to be eaten by the merciless mercenary advancement of technology. Or maybe I’m just feeling glum about all this because my husband and I recently watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. (Go watch it, if you haven’t yet!)
CDs are pretty much incompatible with life in 21st century America, but, imho, there’s still a place for the iPod — especially as more and more of us are trying to reduce our phone usage, but don’t quite know how to live without some degree of modern technology because that’s just how our world is built anymore.
And yes, yes, I’m aware that you can still buy pre-owned iPods, on ebay and such. Artifacts. That’s not what the world needs. That’s not what my soul misses. It’s not even Clarence himself that I miss, so much as the age that he was defined by. The iPod age — the pre-smartphone age. Sure, I could purchase a pre-owned iPod off ebay, but that would not turn back the clock. I don’t have the power to do that. Money is power, and of that I’ve never had much.
But we know who does. The big corporations. They own us. They run this place. They can do anything. Apple, if they wanted to, could virtually turn back the clock for us. They could usher back in the iPod era. They could make the sun rise once again on the Age of Clarence!
So please, Apple — this one little pawn is begging you!: bring back the iPod era! Give Clarence back his rightful place on the throne. Give me back my appreciation for musicians and their craft. Give me back my love of music. Give me back that piece of my soul. I’ll buy it back from you. I’ll give you my money, I promise.
22 responses to “In Memory of Clarence”
I feel that.
Votto.app asked if Shuffle destroyed albums and attention.
I had never been particularly into Shuffle unless with a completely new album – I thought that the makers had put the songs into that order for a reason; even though it was not sacred to me or to them.
Ah yes – the jacket art!
The only reason I saw myself having an iPod was to have music to keep me company while I was exercising or otherwise moving.
I like the idea of “moving on to cure cancer”.
Autocorrect also was a question – Votto.app put it into the context of “the first app we all fought with”.
[for me, for a long time, autocorrect was a Microsoft thing and later on a Google thing].
[Then Apple Macs started to do it in their own apps across the whole system].
Clarence Phineas McLoughlin is such a cool name for an iPod! 😀 I really like giving things human names as well, as you know, but somehow it had never occurred to me to do that with most electronics; I feel so generic and megalomaniac in comparison having named my Apple devices just BibielPhone, iPad Bibiel, BibielWatch and MishMac! 😀
Honestly, for what it’s worth, I think the mere fact that you’re this self-aware of your relationship with music puts you way further ahead of the average peep who, in my experience of “average peeps”, just doesn’t think about what they’re listening to, why they like it, whether maybe there’s something better. If you ask them anything like that, their brain gets fried or they look at you like you’re an idiot. That’s way sadder than just giving into the pressure of how everyone wants to force you to listen to music.
I can’t truly say I miss CDs, perhaps because, while I did listen to them a lot, I don’t happen to have massively nostalgic memories associated with them, mostly because the CDs I had were primarily inherited from my parents or aunt, so I did not have massive attachment to the music itself, and whatever was actually mine would go in and out of favour relatively quickly as my taste happened to be going through fairly rapid changes at the time hahaha. And, unfortunately, I did not really get to experience the iPod era first-hand, as I was reeeally late to the party when it comes to Apple stuff, but also kind of technology in general; my brother and I were recently talking about how, despite being early gen Z, in a lot of ways we feel more like millennials because we only really got to use technology properly since our teens, lol, myself especially. I have bought some albums from iTunes but I’ve actually never as much as had an iPod in my hand, haha.
I do totally agree with you though that that period seems to have been optimal for music listening, out of everything we’ve had so far, and I would be very happy if Apple did miraculously bring the iPod back. Not sure whether I would find a place for one in my own life, as I have a specialised device which plays much the same role minus being cool and widely available, but overall it would have been such a great change! I do use music streaming because it’s seriously difficult not to at this point, but I have a massive love-hate relationship with it. I pirated copious amounts of music as a teenager because most of it was not easily available to me otherwise (not just because I didn’t have my own money for that but would be genuinely impossible to just go to a CD store with Mum and get what I wanted), and I was so looking forward to the time when I’d finally be able to buy my own music properly. Except now that I can do that, I cannot, because there are fewer and fewer places online, and fewer and fewer albums, which you can just plain purchase. And I still want to purchase them, at least if I care about a piece of music as more than something that just sounds nice as background stuff, because I not only want to support the artist who made it, but also want to have my own actual freaking copy, that won’t randomly disappear when Spotify decides that, actually, nah, this isn’t available in your country anymore, or we’ve removed it because blah blah blah, or even when labels/artists themselves remove their music for contractual reasons or similar. And so still, the most reliable option for that in many cases remains pirating. Even a few years ago, there used to be a lot more places online where you could buy music, but that market niche seems to be shrinking very quickly. Streaming services (both music and film ones) brag that they’ve eliminated piracy to a large degree, and I’m surprised that most people are just happy with listening to/watching everything off a server somewhere. It’s like, libraries are great because they make books more affordable, but does the fact that libraries exist eliminate the need for bookshops?
So yeah, I don’t suppose Apple would listen to our appeal, because they now have their Apple Music and I guess it pays off well enough. But, at the same time, a part of me wants to be optimistic. This year, Apple is getting a new CEO. I keep thinking I should go try to analyse and type him in socionics whether he is an ILE like Steve Jobs was, and even though at this point there is little ground to say either way, I naively hope he IS an ILE. Tim Cook, Apple’s current CEO, is not an ILE (maybe an LSI I don’t know), and he’s brought little new to Apple, mostly just focusing on stuff like making it more productive to use Apple devices and otherwise going with the same currents that most other tech companies go with. Maybe if Apple got another ILE, he’d shake things up and we’d have a bit of a positive cultural-technological change, or at least better infrastructure and means for such change to occur.
But BibielPhone and MishMac and etc. are so catchy to say! Love it, haha I haven’t named any electronics since Clarence – he was the last one that seemed to deserve a name. I always just call my phone The Accursed Rectangle. I hope you’re right that being self-aware redeems me somewhat! You guys really missed out on CDs and iPods. 😄 I’m so old that I even remember listening to music on cassettes, when I was really little. That’s cool you have a similar device though. I’ve tried a basic little mp3 player, but it wasn’t nearly as nice, and completely lacked Clarence’s user-friendly finesse. It was just such a polished little system, iTunes + iPod. I agree with you, I love the idea of buying albums to support artists and all, but it’s so complicated these days! I never have been able to get comfortable with Spotify. I did see that Apple is getting a new CEO! I know absolutely nothing about the former guys, but somehow, just having seen their photos online, I can absolutely see how Jobs was ILE and Cook is probable-LSI. I hope you’re right! Convenience comes at a cost for sure.
Oh yes, Shuffle definitely affected my music life! At first it seemed so great – I can just make a playlist of all the songs I like and shuffle it, and don’t have to bother with the bad ones. But when you do that, you miss out on so much that might have surprised you and grown on you. I can think of so many songs that I never would have come to know and love if I’d had a Shuffle thing available at the time. Exactly – iPod was perfect for going for walks, exercising and stuff. I was so used to my CD player skipping if it got bumped or if the school bus hit a pothole or whatever, so it was nice that the iPod was immune to that. If only companies would devote more $$ to things like curing disease instead of continuing to “improve” personal pleasure gadgets. I don’t mind a gentle Autocorrect for obvious mistakes, but it’s gotten so aggressive! Seriously, the other day I was trying repeatedly to write “Beethoven” and my idiot phone kept correcting it to “beehive”! 🙃 thanks for commenting btw!
It’s almost as though they’ve unleashed LLMs (recommended “palms”) into the world wide web of the worst possible grammar.
And are surprised the autocorrect is boned.
Bad news: the new Apple guy sounds like an ST… And while I was at it, I actually looked a little deeper into Jobs (I was only going with what seems like the majority’s opinion that he’s an ILE which seemed like the only sane possibility) and now I’m actually not so sure whether he was an ILE or maybe an LIE. Either way is way better for a tech company CEO than any ST though, I should think.
Cassettes I actually listened to more than CDs, and have a bit more sentiment for them. Not that I’d want them to come back; that’s way too clunky and insanely limiting. I still have an absurdly gigantic collection of fairytales and children’s radio plays and children’s songs on cassettes and even Sofi listened to all that when she was a kid, despite most of her peers had never used a cassette player. And I also recorded whole cassettes full of radio programmes and music from the radio that I liked when I was a kid; something that, over here at least, feels like a ridiculously ’80s/early ’90s thing. It was wild but, we had some radio frequencies that, in our old house, would let you listen in on a phone conversation if someone nearby was having one at the moment, and so I also recorded my parents’ conversations hahaha.
Also agree about autocorrect being idiotic a lot of the time! It gets even crazier when you use it in a multilingual setup and it detects your language wrong and you don’t notice that it did, lol.
I don’t remember the model of my first iPod. A teacher gave it to me. I gave it some obsequious German name because I was into Rammstein from 2005 until technically now, but the last album of theirs I had was Liebe Ist Für Alle Da. I use a stripped old cellphone as my MP3 player now, which is filled mostly with Neofolk, Classical and Church music in Latin and Greek.
Sorry I didn’t leave a better comment before. I was feeding the people (pizza) at our Church’s annual heritage festival. I figured a terse comment was a better metric of reading than nothing at all.
Alas! The downward trend will probably continue. Oh yes, recording stuff off the radio onto cassettes, I remember that too! And recording TV shows onto VCR. I can still smell them! In a way, it was easier back then. And way harder to develop an addiction to trash music. If you wanted to navigate to a specific track, you had to rewind or fast forward, which took ages. Good times! 😅
I appreciate comments of all sizes!! Please no need to apologize. Even a tiny one makes my day. Hope the Greeks enjoyed the pizza 😋
Haha nice! Funny I never got into Rammstein, considering my obsession with German. German names are the coolest. Using a stripped cellphone is really smart, as is your collection of musical genres. I should copy you!
The pizza is for the Americans, the fussy and children. I only got two complaints out of the 30ish pizzas I made and sold.
I’m not saying I don’t relapse. But I’m trying to clean up my tastes. German names are very, very cool. There’s a funny skit actress on YouTube who does a Berliner caricature named Monika.
Do you ever have dolmathes at these church feasts? Do you like them? They’re one of the most hotly-contested foods in my house. I think they’re great, my husband tried them once and thinks they’re the grossest thing ever. 😄
Love that name! What artists in the neo-folk genre do you recommend? Trying to expand our collection. 6 year old loves Irish reels and Loreena McKennitt!
Pah! Gross my foot. I love dolmates. Yes, they have them. They’re served warm. They used to be imported directly from Greece but with tariffs and totally-not-inflation-guys they go to Boston to get them now, where there is a thriving Mediterranean sub community (I’m told.)
Beautiful.
I’m not sure how useful it is, but I’ll link you to my Spotify list. I’ll update it at some point. As I’m sure I’ll remember bands I’ve forgotten.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2wyCedJZBgRVS54ySH5i4o?si=-sl548kpRsekumOSFrgEWw&utm_source=copy-link&pi=8udVDLWdR0OoI
Amazing! My first ever job was at a boutique grocery that sold international foods, and I used to get them at the deli there. They were cold though, and probably not as good as the ones made fresh by actual Greeks!
Sweet, thank you! I’ll check it out. I haven’t been on Spotify in forever. I should probably just get a subscription to the premium version… would probably help a lot with the whole music issue.
Nothing is! What’s more interesting (to me personally) is learning the background of the things. Like olives being named for the village or island that makes them. Kalamata, Volos, etc.
I’m there now because I sold all my CDs of a less than stellar nature, keeping classical, folk, jazz and swing, country and neofolk.