Sept. 3: How iPods have changed the world
I had to drive a 13-year-old girl home the other day. I don't want to
explain why I was driving the 13-year-old home. Suffice it to say that
she lives about 30 minutes away from where I do and that she and her
family trust me enough to drive her home. And that is what I did.
Just prior to the drive home, I had spent a few hours doing something I evidently found irritating (I can't remember what it was but it probably irritated me because it involved me doing something that kept me from my writing.) So when it was time to drive the 13-year-old home, I was agitated. Also, it was a sunny hot day and I had just got my car back from the auto body shop (I hit a deer in July and it did about $8,000 in damage to my car.)
So agitated me coupled with hot weather and new car (with a sunroof) and a 13-year-old who had to get home because her mom was making Shake and Bake for dinner, I was in a unique mood. I climb behind the wheel of my newly repaired car, plug in the iPod, and I say: "Oh please please please let there be some classic rock on here."
I actually own two iPods. One of them, the first one, is an iPod classic. It looks like this:
The iPod classic has 160GB of space on it. That's like 80,000 songs. If I took my entire cassette tape collection from junior high school and somehow managed to put it all on my iPod classic, I'd probably also have room for the entire music collection of everyone I went to high school with. I have thousands of songs on my iPod classic as well as a few books on tape (including Stephen King's uncut version of The Stand) and I'm STILL not even at 20 per cent capacity. I don't have to worry about bogging the iPod classic down with songs from one-hit-wonders like Baltimora or Marcy Playground. There is always going to be room on my iPod classic for anything I want.
Now here's the kicker - I don't know where my iPod classic is right now. It is probably in my portable PA system (which I use for magic shows) but that's not important. What is important is how unconcerned I am with the present whereabouts of my iPod classic. That's because one month ago, I bought an iPhone (which officially makes me a yuppie.) The iPhone looks like this:
My iPhone has about 30GB on it. I can use it for Facebook or Kobo or texting or pretty much anything I want. It also has iTunes but since it only has a fraction of what I had on the iPod classic, and since I also have to use those 30GBs to store my personal photos and videos and anything else I might find important, I don't have as much space for tunes.
So I had to be selective about what music I copied to the iPhone.
I copied all my Prince because he is my favourite artist and I am supposed to be obsessed with him (last month, in case you haven't noticed, every note's title is a Prince song.) But as much as I love Prince, his music just doesn't fit every occasion. I can listen to Prince when I am having a bubble bath (Blue Light) or when I am practicing my magic (The Continental) but I just don't want to listen to him when I am driving down an open highway on a really hot day and the sunroof is open and I am going fast. I want music with some heavy guitar and a singer who sounds like he gargles testosterone and shits rusty nails.
So I peruse my iPhone. There is no Aerosmith. No Van Halen. No David Lee Roth. There's John Mellencamp and that's almost good but it's not heavy enough. Hard rock is supposed to be about parties and summer and girls with long blonde hair and tight jeans and hearts tattooed on their arms. John Mellencamp is kind of about that but he's also about farming and scarecrows and tractors sitting out in fields.
Rock and roll people shouldn't get their feet caught in steering wheels
Also, John Cougar Mellencamp doesn't really sing. I mean, he's not quite as bad as Bob Dylan but there's a reason he's never been listed among the best rock vocalists of all time, it's because he's not really a vocalist. He can kind of carry a tune but I have a hard time imagining him taking singing lessons or trying to hit high C. He's good with a guitar and he's got that downhome farm imagery down pat, but he sho ain't no Steven Tyler (mind you, David Lee Roth isn't either but he makes up for it with pure charisma.)
But we're in luck because my iPhone has a whole bunch of songs by Guns N Roses. I start it up and then we hear the opening of Welcome to the Jungle and then I put the car in reverse and back it out of the stall and then I start the song over again because - I explain to the 13-year-old - you can't start listening to Welcome to the Jungle when you're standing still. You have to be motorvating, moving at a very fast speed. If I was a highway commissioner, I would somehow make it so that traffic lights could detect whenever someone approaching was listening to Guns N Roses and that way the light could always be green.
The 13-year-old appreciated this and she surprised me by telling me that she likes Guns N Roses and that her favourite song by them is Paradise City. This made me happy because I was worried she was going to be a typical 13-year-old and that she would sulk because I wasn't listening to Justin Bieber.
Welcome to the Jungle comes from Guns N Roses debut album, Appetite for Destruction, which looks like this:
Appetite for Destruction has 12 songs on it, seven of which were released as singles. Even so, most people only listen to three songs on the album - Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child O Mine and Paradise City.
I told the 13-year-old that when I was her age, we didn't have iPods. We had these clunky things called cassette tapes. The hottest invention of the day was the Sony Walkman, which was a portable cassette player. People with walkmans could make their own mix tapes. Making a mix tape usually required a double deck tape recorder. The idea was to put a blank tape in one side and the tape with the song you wanted in the other. Then you'd press the play and record buttons and you'd do that until you filled up your blank tape with your favourite music.
Today's kids don't know that joy. They don't make mix tapes anymore. They make playlists and it takes about 30 seconds.
Sucks to be a teenager nowadays.
Just prior to the drive home, I had spent a few hours doing something I evidently found irritating (I can't remember what it was but it probably irritated me because it involved me doing something that kept me from my writing.) So when it was time to drive the 13-year-old home, I was agitated. Also, it was a sunny hot day and I had just got my car back from the auto body shop (I hit a deer in July and it did about $8,000 in damage to my car.)
So agitated me coupled with hot weather and new car (with a sunroof) and a 13-year-old who had to get home because her mom was making Shake and Bake for dinner, I was in a unique mood. I climb behind the wheel of my newly repaired car, plug in the iPod, and I say: "Oh please please please let there be some classic rock on here."
I actually own two iPods. One of them, the first one, is an iPod classic. It looks like this:
The iPod classic has 160GB of space on it. That's like 80,000 songs. If I took my entire cassette tape collection from junior high school and somehow managed to put it all on my iPod classic, I'd probably also have room for the entire music collection of everyone I went to high school with. I have thousands of songs on my iPod classic as well as a few books on tape (including Stephen King's uncut version of The Stand) and I'm STILL not even at 20 per cent capacity. I don't have to worry about bogging the iPod classic down with songs from one-hit-wonders like Baltimora or Marcy Playground. There is always going to be room on my iPod classic for anything I want.
Now here's the kicker - I don't know where my iPod classic is right now. It is probably in my portable PA system (which I use for magic shows) but that's not important. What is important is how unconcerned I am with the present whereabouts of my iPod classic. That's because one month ago, I bought an iPhone (which officially makes me a yuppie.) The iPhone looks like this:
My iPhone has about 30GB on it. I can use it for Facebook or Kobo or texting or pretty much anything I want. It also has iTunes but since it only has a fraction of what I had on the iPod classic, and since I also have to use those 30GBs to store my personal photos and videos and anything else I might find important, I don't have as much space for tunes.
So I had to be selective about what music I copied to the iPhone.
I copied all my Prince because he is my favourite artist and I am supposed to be obsessed with him (last month, in case you haven't noticed, every note's title is a Prince song.) But as much as I love Prince, his music just doesn't fit every occasion. I can listen to Prince when I am having a bubble bath (Blue Light) or when I am practicing my magic (The Continental) but I just don't want to listen to him when I am driving down an open highway on a really hot day and the sunroof is open and I am going fast. I want music with some heavy guitar and a singer who sounds like he gargles testosterone and shits rusty nails.
So I peruse my iPhone. There is no Aerosmith. No Van Halen. No David Lee Roth. There's John Mellencamp and that's almost good but it's not heavy enough. Hard rock is supposed to be about parties and summer and girls with long blonde hair and tight jeans and hearts tattooed on their arms. John Mellencamp is kind of about that but he's also about farming and scarecrows and tractors sitting out in fields.
Rock and roll people shouldn't get their feet caught in steering wheelsAlso, John Cougar Mellencamp doesn't really sing. I mean, he's not quite as bad as Bob Dylan but there's a reason he's never been listed among the best rock vocalists of all time, it's because he's not really a vocalist. He can kind of carry a tune but I have a hard time imagining him taking singing lessons or trying to hit high C. He's good with a guitar and he's got that downhome farm imagery down pat, but he sho ain't no Steven Tyler (mind you, David Lee Roth isn't either but he makes up for it with pure charisma.)
But we're in luck because my iPhone has a whole bunch of songs by Guns N Roses. I start it up and then we hear the opening of Welcome to the Jungle and then I put the car in reverse and back it out of the stall and then I start the song over again because - I explain to the 13-year-old - you can't start listening to Welcome to the Jungle when you're standing still. You have to be motorvating, moving at a very fast speed. If I was a highway commissioner, I would somehow make it so that traffic lights could detect whenever someone approaching was listening to Guns N Roses and that way the light could always be green.
The 13-year-old appreciated this and she surprised me by telling me that she likes Guns N Roses and that her favourite song by them is Paradise City. This made me happy because I was worried she was going to be a typical 13-year-old and that she would sulk because I wasn't listening to Justin Bieber.
Welcome to the Jungle comes from Guns N Roses debut album, Appetite for Destruction, which looks like this:
Appetite for Destruction has 12 songs on it, seven of which were released as singles. Even so, most people only listen to three songs on the album - Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child O Mine and Paradise City.
I told the 13-year-old that when I was her age, we didn't have iPods. We had these clunky things called cassette tapes. The hottest invention of the day was the Sony Walkman, which was a portable cassette player. People with walkmans could make their own mix tapes. Making a mix tape usually required a double deck tape recorder. The idea was to put a blank tape in one side and the tape with the song you wanted in the other. Then you'd press the play and record buttons and you'd do that until you filled up your blank tape with your favourite music.
Today's kids don't know that joy. They don't make mix tapes anymore. They make playlists and it takes about 30 seconds.
Sucks to be a teenager nowadays.
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