"It's the smell"

Four apparently unrelated events have got me thinking. Firstly, I've started re-watching Buffy from series one. Secondly, I also watched High Fidelity. Thirdly the cassette that now sits proudly at the top of my blog and finally a conversation I had with a couple of my flat mates about owning cd's as oppose to downloading them.

And what I've been thinking is this... is all this technology/itunes/ipod stuff ruining the way we relate to music?

I'll expand a bit. The reason I think (because I haven't actually had chance to talk to Lloyd since he 'pimped my blog') there is now a cassette at the top of my blog is my love of music and more accurately my complete anality/geekiness over music to the point where I have, by some people, been likened to the main character in high fidelity. Watching high fidelity the other day, as Rob was talking about making compilation tapes, and with that reminder of the old fashioned cassette on my blog, I was thinking about all the compilation tapes I've made over the years. From the age of 11-12 I've been making compilation tapes, sometimes for me, sometimes for friends who I think should have better music taste, sometimes for girls I've liked or even on the odd occasion been going out with. As a teenager I used to spend so much time making these tapes, planning them on paper before I would spend my time getting my tapes into the right place and slowly, in real time, copying the tracks one by one onto my cheap C90 cassettes.

But what is todays equivalent of a compilation tape? If I want a friend to listen to something now, I have to get him to listen to it on my ipod or off my computer because, to save on the amount of things I'm carrying round at the moment, all my cd's are boxed up in Sheffield having first been copied to my hard drive. I can make playlists for people, but they're still limited to my ipod and my computer. I can even now easily burn cd's for people, but it's so easy to do, the care and time and thought and effort that I used to put into making a truly great compilation tape isn't needed any more, it's just a case of dragging a few track titles around and clicking burn. It's just not the same.

But the compilation tapes question is just part of something bigger that is bothering me about all this. Now every piece of music I own is basically on one disc and I can pick and choose from that list what I put on my ipod, but then I have 10gbs (depressingly small I know) worth of music on my ipod that is also on one disc. I love this idea. I love the fact that every where I go I always have with me everything the Beatles, U2, Radiohead ever recorded along with all my favourite songs, albums and a good selection of other bits and pieces of music with me wherever I go. Like I say, I love this idea, but there are a number of problems with it. First thing is that all this technology has changed the way I listen to music. It's now very rare that I will listen to an album all the way through, and when I do, it's usually an album that I know really well and love. Since I've got my ipod and my computer I don't listen to albums, I put on a playlist of my favourite songs, or choose to listen to a particular artist or genre. Why is it that there are true musicians out there carefully creating their tracklistings, making sure that one song compliments another and that there's a coherence to the music they've made. What's the point of them doing that if all I'm going to do is stick it in with everything else they've ever recorded, or worse with a whole bunch of other songs by other people? Does this new, wonderful technology mean the end of the album as an art form and that only good songs now count? More importantly, am I the only person that does this? If I am then maybe these questions are irrelevant.

Finally, I'm sure you'll be pleased to know, the buffy link. There's a character in Buffy who is (at least some of the time) a school librarian and he's having a series of arguments with the computer teacher about the importance of books over computers, finally she asks him why he doesn't like computers and he this:

Giles (the librarian): The smell.
Ms. Calendar (the computer teacher): Computer's don't smell, Rupert.
Giles: I know! Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a, a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences... long forgotten. Books smell. Musty and, and, and, and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer, is, uh, it... it has no, no texture, no, no context. It's, it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then, then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um... smelly.

And this is my final point. While I'm not claiming cd's are smelly, there's something that feels right about owning a cd, reading the booklet, buying it on the day it comes out, having them organised on your shelf that seems to me to show more commitment, more of a connection to the music, than simply downloading a file from itunes. Music is intangible, when it comes down to it, it's just vibrating airwaves, having something tangible like a cd somehow makes it something you can call you own and for some reason, having a file on a computer doesn't seem the same.

I still love my ipod though.