These Kids Today, and Their Fancy MP3's!

I have a strong tendency towards curmudgeonry. I love the phrase "These kids today..." and have been using it with an ever-decreasing sense of irony since my early twenties. But one modern trend with which I have kept pace is the migration from CD's to MP3 players. I love my iPod so much, it hurts my heart. I love that I have not minutes, not hours, but days of music, audiobooks, and Spanish lessons at my fingertips. Whatever I may be in the mood for at any given moment, it's available. What could be better than that? But I've noticed that my sense of context is gone, chronologically, physically, socially.

Chronologically, I have no idea what year most of the music I'm listening to originally came out, so that I'm revelling in the discovery of the crazy new sound of Hooverphonic ten years after it was originally released. While I am still taken back to a particular moment when I listen to a particular song, the moment that I first got addicted to Peter, Bjorn & John's "Young Folks" and cemented the addiction through horrific, repeated abuse that made Mrs. Rodius want to jab me in the eye with a ballpoint pen, that moment no longer has specific context in the larger world.

Physically, there's no longer a tangible artifact inextricably connected to the music anymore. When I was younger, I would listen to a new CD while looking at the artwork and reading the liner notes. A cassette that didn't have the lyrics printed on the long origami of the insert was a sore disappointment indeed. Today, I may or may not know what the CD cover looks like, but I certainly don't have the mental association between the image and the sound cemented in my mental conception of it the way I used to. And if I shuffle a whole playlist or an entire genre of music, I may recognize the artist, but I often don't know which album the song comes from, or which track number on that album it is. Music floats out in an undefined, nebulous space in my mind, no longer tethered to the physical object from which it came.

Socially, I'm finding music through a much broader system of links, recommendations, and accidental stumblings, so there's not as much of a sense of shared experience as there was when I was listening to the same newly released Metallica album that everybody else in my peer group was listening to, at the same time they were listening to it. It's not just technology that's affected the shared experience of music for me; music is no longer central to or universal to my peer group. But the broadening of communication in the last decade or so has broadened the group of people who influence my musical selections and weakened the degree to which music is part of a social connection.

And that word, album. I think it dates me. I tried hard not to use it above, but still it managed to sneak in there. I maintain that a CD is an album. A cassette was an album. But I may be in the minority. Album evokes vinyl for many people now.

Anyway, I'm somehow feeling wistful now. These kids today and their fancy electronics! I remember when I had to flip the cassette over in my generic Walkman made of three pounds of bright yellow plastic. And I was glad, and lucky to have it! We didn't care about playlists and randomizing tracks. We listened to an album straight through, in the track order that God intended. Bah! I yank my pants up as high as they'll go and shake my fist in the air! These kids today!