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:
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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.