I was watching the Tragically Hip documentary (finally) over the weekend, when all of a sudden, one thing struck me. I haven’t listened to the Hip for a while. As the documentary (highly recommended btw) sequentially uncovered the Hip’s full discography, discussing album by album – efforts like We Are the Same, World Container, and In Violet Light, I realized I used to listen to those regularly. And Coke Machine Glow was in the rotation from time to time (Chancellor is one of the best songs Gord ever wrote – I mean who the hell else could rhyme ‘pyjamas’ with ‘windows’)
These albums are all available to me; it’s not like I’d have to go out and buy them all (again). I have Spotify. I pay $15 a month. That means I’ve paid at least $1800 for a music app that has everything I could ever want (except Neil Young and Jonie Mitchell for a time: respect). But here’s the thing: I’ve paid that much money over the years, but I’ve actually narrowed my listening preferences, not expanded them.
How the hell could that be?
When I’m faced with listening to any album I want, across thirty some odd years of music, there’s just too many to choose from. The paradox of choice is real. At least it is for me. I just draw a blank. I can’t remember what to remember. So I just listen to what is in my recent listening folder. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
It has me thinking about the days of the iPod. The device that’s sitting in a drawer with no battery power and no charging cord. It’s latent power sitting idle, full of melodies and memories. A catalogue of music wasted. The joy it brought me is still fresh in my mind, though; times spent scrolling through artists until I landed on the one I wanted and then the exact album I wanted. Sometimes just the song I wanted. But it was all there, neatly catalogued away for quick findin’.
It was easy to shuffle through hundreds, even thousands, of artists in my catalogue. Actually, I could literally shuffle through all my tunes using their…well, Shuffle option. Sure it wasn’t perfect, but it was a way to sit back and let the technology work for me, not against me.
Don’t get me wrong, technology is certainly more advanced now than ever before, but I would argue it no longer works for me as much as it does against me. Both Youtube and Spotify are gathering data about me and creating algorithms to keep me using their platform longer. My iPod never did any of that shit. It just did what I asked it do. Now my music platforms talk back – engage with me, and it’s not for my betterment. It’s for theirs. Or their owners: some rich sleazeball who rubs shoulders with other rich sleazeballs like Zuck and Musk. And don’t get me started on how little Spotify pays musicians! It’s highway robbery.
And even though the iPod Shuffle was a cool feature, a convenient one, I still preferred doing it manually anyways – scrolling around until I found the right song to follow up with my finger hovered over the black bullseye until it was time to cue it up.
No better example of this than when I got my hands on an iPod for the first time.
It was Australia 2007, a group of twenty of us had just returned to Airlie Beach from a wild tour through the Whitsunday Islands. We were sitting in a beer garden waiting for the shuttle to the airport to fly back to Brisbane. My friends Ted, Bowdie and Tree had just convinced me to ride back with them in Bowdie’s van, so I ditched my flight and took them up on the offer. We drove along the coast from Airlie to Brisbane over two days and along the way got to eat Australia’s best hamburger and bar hop through Rockhampton, but more importantly I got my hands on my first iPod. I remember how cool it looked, how small it was compared to my Discman, and how much I loved flipping through the endless catalogue.
I played DJ for most of the road trip home as Bowdie had rigged up a little speaker system for the van. I loved finding that perfect road trip playlist, finger hovering over my next tune as I waited for each song to end. I was in love with this new way of listening to music. When I got home to Canada later that year, I replaced my bulky Discman with a sexy black new 32 gig iPod and started loading it up with every album I could.
It was peak technology for me. It was a time when the digital world actually made my life better. I had a flip phone with nothing to steal my gaze other than the odd text. I had a big bulky Dell laptop to work on. I had a Facebook account that I checked once a day. Nothing was ‘smart’ yet. These days, every piece of technology I use is smarter than I am, learning from me, suggesting things for me, talking to me, listening to me. Even my stove is so advanced it boils water in a minute and steals that relaxing slow act of making dinner after a long day. It used to give me to time to unwind; now it’s so efficient it’s done before I can even start to chill out.
My car beeps at me every few seconds notifying me of every fucking thing within a two metre radius including big fluffy snowflakes during a snow storm. For an amazing driver like myself, who hasn’t been in an accident since I was eighteen, it actually makes my life worse off. I don’t need my car to tell me I’m three feet away from something; my eyes can do that just fine.
Don’t even get me started on social media apps and how bad they’ve become. Facebook is just a constant stream of vomit (besides the Rrampt posts, of course), and I don’t like to dance, so Tik Tok is out for me. Every platform is full of ads and polarizing content. It’s designed to make me angry, and I’m certainly not better off if I’m constantly agitated.
I guess I just miss the days when my technology was just a little simpler and not designed to maximize my engagement at every turn or make my life uber-convenient. I want my tech to make me do some of work – meet it halfway at least. I was happy to scroll through my catalogue on my iPod to find another song while my current song was playing. It kept me engaged in the act. Like driving my manual car (which they’re not making much anymore either). I used to be engaged and active in my digital world. Now, I’m just fed the next song, the video, the next article, and I mindlessly choose it.
But sadly, my iPhone sits idle in the drawer, along with my old clunky laptop, a few VHS tapes, mixed CD’s, my old Gameboy and Discman. My manual car has broken down and been sold for scrap. The fateful day when I was ushered into the Spotify age happened on cold fall morning when I was living on the Bruce Peninsula. I was feeding the chickens before I left for work in the morning, and as I bent down to wash my hands in the stream, I felt something release from my inside breast pocket. There, below me, shimmering in light at the bottom of the stream, was my precious black device, on the screen a Brian Jonestown Massacre song I would never listen to again. I tried putting it in rice and all the other tricks, but it was forever broken after that. It only plays while connected to a charging cord, and the charging cord is now MIA.
BJM one of the casualty bands that I have forgotten about over the years, along with Jesse Malin, The Kooks, Regina Spektor, Michael Franti… and yes, underrated Tragically Hip albums.
What Spotify feeds me each week in my Release Radar keeps me satiated with things it ‘thinks’ I want to hear. And it’s right. I do want to hear them. It’s just that they’re thousands of other songs I want to listen to as well. But when faced with thinking about what those songs are, I draw a blank. I don’t remember thirty years of music in the minute I have to decide before I walk somewhere or start driving.
Eventually, Spotify will just narrow it down to one song that will keep me pacified and forget there are even any other artists out there. They’ll narrow it down to one perfectly tailored playlist providing me what David Foster Wallace calls an ‘Infinite Jest’ and I won’t be able to remember when my life was simpler, and my digital technology offered me a reasonable, finite choice, not a paradox of infinite choice.
Or maybe I should just stop being so whiny and sentimental, and go find a used iPod somewhere. Anyone selling?
Written by Jesse Wilkinson
