iPod pleasure

when did i start loving music? when did i start really paying attention to it?

my brother had this huge LP collection. then he won a drawing at a local music store and won something like 500 more LPs. it was a huge deal. a lot of them were garbage, but a lot of them were worth keeping. if you had a question about a band or an album, craig would usually know the answer. he gave me hand-me-down 8-track tapes of rickie lee jones, earth wind & fire, and barry manilow. and later he gave me cyndi lauper's "she's so unusual" on vinyl, and linda ronstadt's awesome rock album, "mad love," which featured at least two elvis costello covers.

craig gave me my first mixed tape, "music for white men" (i was called "white man" as a child because i was so lacking in pigment), when i was a freshman in high school, right around '81-'82. it contained: laurie anderson, the roches, randy newman, mel torme, peter gabriel, the violent femmes, todd rundgren, the shangri-las, xtc, kid creole & the coconuts, jonathan richman, tom waits, godley & creme, dionne warwick, tom tom club, frank sinatra, the waitresses, loudon wainwright III, bryan ferry, the beatles, lindsey buckingham, and kate bush. this particular tape, i have since realized, shaped my sense of what a music collection should be-- eclectic, above all... also, surprising, fanciful, with blasts of the past and the future. i have told craig about the debt i owe him for bringing such a broad and rich spectrum of musical taste into my life. i don't claim to have particularly good taste; but you can't deny it's eclectic.

this broad and rich spectrum has taken on many vehicles over the years (walkmans, car stereos, discmans), but the most recent and most amazing vehicle so far has been my iPod. now i have sensed the backlash against iPods, and i understand it-- there's something a little evil about them in the sense that they are becoming ubiquitous and that they seem to cut people off from each other. true enough. my pleasure in the iPod is the still mind-staggering fact that my e n t i r e  m u s i c  c o l l e c t i o n can reside within its perfectly compact rectangular body. something about this fact turns me on no end. i can float down memory lane by flipping to "sandwiches of you" whenever i want. all those songs i love can be in my pocket at all times. i made an iPod playlist of "music for white men" and it is beautiful... still beautiful.

i got my iPod in may of '07 and have been loading it down with pretty much every album in my possession since then. it is now reaching its maximum capacity (i have only 2 GBs left out of 80) and so i have been worrying that i am either going to run out of room or that it will crash and i will lose all that beautifulness. 

so i have been considering ways to insure the iPod. since i don't necessarily still have all the cds that are contained on it, and i wouldn't necessarily feel happy about sitting down to download them all again, i was considering purchasing another iPod and transferring all the music on the existing one onto a new one. i saw in a magazine that there's a doohickey you can get which will plug into two iPods and transfer files from one to the other. i researched that a bit, and it seemed more complicated than i had in mind.

but yesterday i downloaded Music Rescue 4.0. what it does, according to the apple tech worker i spoke with, is: "it sucks the music out of your iPod and into a file, then you can download it onto your iTunes." so that's what i did-- i got Music Rescue, plugged in my iPod and my external hard drive (120 GB), and backed up all my music onto my hard drive. 

talk about bliss. bliss. as tootsie says, "sheer heaven."

that oboe/clarinet solo on joni mitchell's "down to you." the irresistable whistling hook on "young folks" by peter bjorn & john. kate bush's roar on "get out of my house." hey, i remember where i was when i first heard that. i remember the feeling i had.