IPod dilemma

• Text settings

  Text size

  • Small
  • Medium
  • Large

  Line Spacing

  • Compact
  • Normal
  • Spacious
• Comments
• Share

  Share

  Marcus Berkmann

  IPod dilemma

  Copy link

  • Linkedin
  • Messenger
  • Email

Already a subscriber? Log in

This article is for subscribers only

Subscribe today to get 3 months' delivery of the magazine, as well as online and app access, for only £3.

• Weekly delivery of the magazine
• Unlimited access to our website and app
• Enjoy Spectator newsletters and podcasts
• Explore our online archive, going back to 1828

Most popular

Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

So, the big question — and this is the sort of issue a male music fan’s mind loves to grapple with when it should be doing something more sensible — is which albums to put on. I have an iPod nano and therefore room for about 25 albums. New or old? Loud, soft, surprising, utterly familiar, complex, straightforward…what? Not to mention which, when and how?

First, I put a few newish albums on. I don’t usually listen to music on headphones, and this seemed like a good way of getting to know these albums more quickly. (It always takes me ages; I’ve never known how real critics can make coherent judgments on the basis of a handful of listens.) But iPods are ruthless little buggers. They don’t tolerate filler. Either an album is pure gold from beginning to end or you’re flicking on to the next track. (It strikes me now that it is headphones that have changed the way we listen to music, not specifically the iPod or the internet. Headphones have a far more brutal quality threshold than your naked ears.) Newish albums were therefore discarded and replaced by much loved older albums I hadn’t listened to for a while. Hearing them on headphones added a new dimension to each, although again I found myself weeding out a few secondary albums by favourite bands: only the best would do. I still don’t have the definitive 25 — I’m not sure there is any such thing — but trying to decide what next to discard and what to replace it with now occupies a satisfying proportion of my idle thoughts.

So, talking to my friend the musician again, I asked him how much being a fan of other people’s music (which he is, overwhelmingly) had contributed to his own music. Because it seems to me that only by being a fan can you appreciate other fans’ incredibly complex relationships with the music they love. You can go through so many phases with an album. I have written here before about Boo Hewerdine’s Harmonograph and Kirsty McGee’s Frost, from 2006 and 2004 respectively. The former is a mainly acoustic set of simply glorious pop songs he had originally written for other people, the latter glistening modern folk from a grievously underpromoted Manchester singer-songwriter. But it’s only now, a couple of years down the line, having listened to these albums with all my attention, put them on in the background and forgotten about them for a while, that with the help of the iPod I have to come to realise just how special they are, at least to me. My friend the musician understood completely, although he’d be more likely to run across Trafalgar Square dressed as a carrot than listen to either of them. He thinks that being a fan keeps him sane. It’s the enthusiasm that matters, not what it’s for.

Still, my other friend the garden designer may have found the way forward. She decided that there wasn’t enough room on her iPod, so she bought another one. A simple, practical solution, that will make Apple shareholders very happy indeed.