MySpace and MyPod

by Bill Carney

Both of my bands (the Jug Addicts and Les Sans Culottes) have had MySpace.com pages for a couple of years now. While I appreciate that it allows rather small-time outfits to engage in the self-promotional Ponzi scheme that is MySpace, it is mind boggling to see the number of bands and individuals that have customized (or “pimped” in MySpace parlance) their MySpace sites with almost completely unreadable graphics. It is the visual equivalent of the music that our nation’s torture experts use, along with stress positions, targeted humiliation, and sleep deprivation, to break down the will of their prisoners. I can’t recall if blasting “Welcome to the Jungle” was sufficient in itself to ferret out Manuel Noriega from his place of sanctuary in the Panamanian Papal Nuncio, but I feel fairly certain that some of these MySpace pages would have done the job. If Bush and Attorney General Gonzalez start surfing MySpace, I am sure it is only a short matter of time before the torture plan for our myriad Guanatanamos includes these brain scrambling and punishing MySpace pages. I knew that once Rupert Murdoch got hold of MySpace it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped.

I got my IPOD (MyPod one year ago. Quite frankly, I was intent upon rocking my Sony Walkman until they came back into fashion again as part of the 80's retro craze. I was content to be totally behind the times knowing that I was ahead of the next wave. Sometimes you have to be willing to pay the price to be cutting edge and fashion forward. I pictured myself as the musical equivalent of one of those Japanese Imperial Army guys, crawling out of the jungle 50 years after the war. Death before dishonor. But now I got an IPOD so another brilliant plan has been blown to Hell.

With the IPOD (which I think stand for InterPersonal Oneupsmanship Device), I initially organized my library into playlists with names such as “Rock,” “Totally Rockin” and “Awesome Rawk,” simply to distinguish them from one another. As a longtime, obsessive compiler of mixed tapes (see Sony Walkman para., ante) I organized my playlists into a play order, as a musician might try to pace the set of music for a performance. My preferred modus operandi is to have pretty sharp contrasts from one song to another, mixing genres and tempos. I realized, however, that my lists compiled for the IPOD were simply no match for the cassette collections. They suffered from having been compiled too easily, through the magic of click and drag and without the necessity of recording them in real time. I once heard Godard complaining about digital film editing versus analog in much the same way. My new click and drag playlists lacked the sturm and drang of the analog playlists.

So I succumbed to the IPOD’s infamous “shuffle” setting. I say infamous because of all the ridiculous hyperbole that has been put forward in the media about how this function supposedly revolutionized way people listen to music. The proponents of this theory claimed that listeners suddenly had much broader tastes in music because they were now shuffling their playlists. Of course, for years before the IPOD, many people had cd players with a shuffle function, and those CD players allowed the listener to load in dozens or even hundreds of CDs. Personally, I always liked the five CD shuffle because I felt it allowed one to be selective about the five CD and the ultimate playlist universe so it was keyed into whatever mood I was in, but also allowed for interesting contrasts within those five CDs.

In my experience the feature was far from foolproof. It had some secret formula for weighing the five CDs, and in fact seemed to favor certain songs on each CD. So if, for instance, “Some Girls” by the Rolling Stones was in the mix, inevitably the first track played from that disc was “The Girl with Far Away Eyes.” Truly, there was a ghost in the machine. Also, I will make a deal with Mick Jagger. He doesn’t have to listen to Roger Miller sing “London Swings Like a Pendulum Do” ever again if I don’t have to hear him try and sing another country song.

In addition, if there were five CDs in rotation, the shuffle feature focused on four of them and did not play one of them. I guess the feature was truly random since it did not distribute the music from various records equally. It would eventually play every song if you played all of the CDs to completion but did so unevenly, almost radically so through some secret, yet annoying principle of selection. And if, God Forbid, you decided that one of the CDs in rotation was not really playing nicely with the others and opened the CD exchange feature, the shuffle was back to square one. You then were likely to hear most of the songs you had already heard before, in fact, the aforementioned shuffle “favorites.”

The IPOD seems to recreate the shuffle favorite feature. Or it seems to be focusing on just one section of the playlist instead of moving up and down all of the 1000 songs in the potential playlist. Recently, in pressing my “next” feature as part of a quiz someone sent me, five of the fifteen selections were from the Dirtbombs. While their music is well representd on my IPOD, it was frustrating that the IPOD was not offering me the variety of music that the company and the media trumpeted as part of the device’s purported revolutionary impact on music listening.

So I was driven back to the playlists. A recent solution for me was to listen to all of the songs on my playlist alphabetically. This approach, much more so than the “shuffle” feature was in fact a revolutionary way for me to listen to music. I was pleased to see that there were no clunkers among the Number Songs on my IPOD. Since the alphabetical system starts with all the songs beginning with numbers (or other symbols before the A through Z alphabetical sequence starts), I discovered the first song on my “alphabetical” playlist was in fact “$1000 Wedding” by Gram Parsons. The IPOD, appropriately, respects the dollar sign before all else. Next, come the songs that begin with parentheticals such as “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” and “(I Don’t Want to go to) Chelsea. That got me thinking about how much I like this convention of titling songs. (Perhaps The Whole World Would Be) Better If (This convention Were) More Widespread. Because as things stand now (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.

After the parade of parenthetical titles, I have a Spanish language song that starts with the upside down ! mark they use in Spanish (and which I also think English would do well to employ). And then there are 13 number songs. These include, “16 with a Bullet” by Scott Morgan, “1970” by the Stooges, “2012” by SSM, “25 Hours a Day” by Kim Fowley, and “7 and 7 is” by Love. And then it’s on to the alphabet. There are a good number of songs starting with “Country,” a decent showing by “Dead” or “Death,” and “Don’t” is a very popular sentiment in song titles, I have discovered. “Get” is represented by “Get Down Tonight,” “Get It Together,” “Get It While You Can,” “Get Out Of Denver,” and the wonderful “Get You Off” by the Go. “Hey” would also do well on Family Feud because there is ‘Hey Joe,” “Hey Linda,” “Hey Sailor” and “Hey Teacher,” and finally “Hey! Little Boy” (the only one to use an exclamation form of “Hey”). Perhaps, the top title starter is “I’m,” “I am” or “I” which makes sense to me, and I can hardly say I am surprised although somewhat saddened that it beats out the titles beginning with “Love.” The last song is “Zero Point,” and there is only one Zero.