When you’re as stubborn as I am, 5,731 songs can get old
in a hurry.
That’s how many songs I have on my iPod. I’ve got a
diverse selection ranging from college favorites like Radiohead and
Kanye West all the way to far-out wackiness like Wesley Willis and
Optimus Rhyme.
Yet strangely, while I love having all of my music at my
immediate disposal, I listen to a surprisingly small amount of it.
I probably consistently listen to 20 percent of the music on my
iPod. I’d also guess that there’s another 20 percent
that I haven’t even listened to at all.
It can be daunting to have thousands of songs to listen to.
iTunes doesn’t exactly make things easier by the way it
organizes things. According to the software, I have over 13
days’ worth of songs, so if I want to listen to everything, I
have to take two weeks and do nothing else but listen to music in
order to get through it all. This makes listening to the same Sonic
Youth albums ad nauseam look pretty inviting.
That’s why I’m grateful for the “shuffle
songs” feature. Thanks to shuffle, listening to music is
exciting again.
Shuffling songs is not a new feature ““ it’s been
around since the birth of the CD. But until the debut of music
players that could hold thousands of songs, the level of variety
available was never large enough to make things this
interesting.
Suddenly your life is cut into four-minute (on average) snippets
where you have no idea what to expect. Now you just want to keep
your iPod on constantly, and you’re tempted to keep listening
to it at the most inopportune times if only to see what happens.
One of thousands of songs could come on, and you’re dying to
find out what it will be.
It’s like reading a gripping book, only you feel a lot
dumber.
Moreover, you’re forced to listen to stuff that you would
never play otherwise. You may think this is a ridiculous way to be
introduced to new music, but I had two Pavement albums on my hard
drive for a year before I decided to give them a listen, and
Pavement is now one of my favorite bands. Great stuff can sit
around until you decide to take initiative. … And sometimes you
need to be forced.
For an example that hits on the best of both worlds, I had
Elliott Smith’s posthumous album, “From a Basement on
the Hill,” for two years and refused to listen to it for fear
that its finality would depress me too much.
Thanks to shuffle, however, I was forced to listen to a song
from the album while on vacation recently. Just as I thought, the
song that came on (“Twilight”) was terribly depressing.
So depressing that I almost threw myself off the boat I was on at
the time.
And then shuffle did something insane: the second
“Twilight” ended, on came a song by the Go! Team, a
band that is the musical equivalent of Elmo from “Sesame
Street” hugging everything in sight while farting out
rainbows and puppies.
Going from Elliott Smith to the Go! Team was like when I went to
Boy Scout camp and took a swim test. The water in the pool was so
cold that we had to shower off before going in, simply because if
we had jumped in without first lowering our body temperatures,
we’d have had heart attacks.
This experience was like jumping in that pool without a
shower.
When any one of 5,731 songs can burst through your headphones
without warning, this is how crazy your life suddenly becomes.
Humphrey can’t wait to listen to his shuffled music at
Express Mart, the most happening place in Westwood. E-mail him at
mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.