A man smashes a newly purchased iPod with his feet. Photo: smashmyipod.com
Haven't you heard? MP3 players are killing music. That's not a charge braying dryly from the mouth of a corporate fatcat, or a notion steaming from the ears of a sound-quality fascist. It's something else entirely - an idea brewing in the brain of an old-fashioned music fan. Me.
I realised my love affair with brawny mp3 players was waning a while ago. My 40GB model, my heart's dear love and my constant companion, stopped responding to my touches; his voice withered to a croak; he breathed his last breath. I thought I'd be devastated - instead I was liberated. The giddy fever I'd first experienced shuffling through all those songs had given way to other aches and pains: repetitive strain injury from track-skipping, mild headaches from hearing clunkers among the corkers, and a slow, dulling sense of chronic fatigue.
At the start of the romance, the temptation to give my mp3 player everything had taken me over. Here, my little darling, I'd whisper to it softly, take my mediocre albums, my flash-in-the-pan fancies, these funny bits of fluff that may briefly amuse your little plastic brain. It was less, then, that the mp3 player was killing music; it was more to do with me. I wanted to test the little devil to its limit: I wanted to fill the bloody thing up. The result, in my case, was a musical junkyard; the aural equivalent of a teenage boy's bedroom.
But was I the only one indulging in such behaviour? Apparently not. A colleague recently announced he was ditching his 60GB iPod for a nano - the technological equivalent of dumping a buxom beauty for a simple size zero - so he could concentrate on less music rather than more. Another was moved to write an article for The Word about the way in which mp3 shuffles eroded nostalgia: how listening to records out of order could upset your relationship with an album's subtle narrative. Another friend was ditching his player entirely, and had started listening to records at home again - taking time to sit down at the end of the day, pour a tea or a beer, take the vinyl out of the sleeve, place it on the spindle, and drop the stylus onto a black, gentle groove. This wasn't some kind of vinyl snobbery, he insisted, it was more about listening to music properly again, rather than having it constantly in the background, like some hazy sonic wallpaper.
The problem we've got here whirls around three very modern malaises: choice (there's too much of it), order (there's too little of it) and size (it isn't everything). When choice rears its head, especially when the options to choose from are cheap - high street sales, bargain stores, download sites, you name it - Supermarket Sweep mode can set in and crap start to fill cupboards and hard drives. But hey kids, that's capitalism. When order starts to break down, better songs rise like cream to the top (which is good) but your sense of an album as a complete work goes up in a puff of smoke. Remember that wonderful feeling of knowing the start of the next song as the current one finishes? I haven't felt that for years (this is bad).
And size? Well, yes, it's true - it's not how big your player is, it's what you do with it. But faced with options larger than I ever thought possible, I've decided to opt out. I've bought a tiny mp3 player - 500 songs max - and am uploading two albums a day, one to listen to on the way to work, one on the way home, both deleted from the player when the night draws in. I've become reacquainted with New Order's Power, Corruption And Lies, and met albums sitting in my racks for years that I'd never really listened to, like Saint Etienne's Tiger Bay.
And guess what? That fever is back. Some days may bring little disappointments, but others bring with them soft, hot-cheeked crushes that make my knees turn to jelly and my heart turn to mush. The old adage rings true: when we exercise a little restraint and a little control, great things can happen.
