A friend of mine recently used this word to describe me. I admit it, freely and without fear of the implications. What prompted this was a discussion of the merits or lack thereof of MP3 players versus CDs. My complaint about iPods and MP3 players is quite simple - the sound reproduction on them is usually pretty bad. While it may be convenient to carry around something the size of a pack of cigarettes that holds ten thousand of your favorite songs, what you gain in convenience you lose in sound quality. To me, they sound like the little AM transistor radio I had as a child in the very early 1970's.
Since the first days of recorded sound - Thomas Edison scratching noises onto wax cylinders - the goal has always been verisimilitude. Engineers have tried to create recordings that are as close to live sounds as possible. From acrylic discs to vinyl, from hi fidelity recordings to stereo, from the long playing record to the eight-track to the compact disc - try to get it to sound as if you were standing in the room with the musicians, listening to them play. All that has been discarded, however, as we have switched from fidelity to convenience. I find this opportunism dishearenting; companies would rather make a quick buck than continue their relentless search for faithful sound reproduction.
Unlike many of my peers (I came of age with the birth of compact discs and welcomed them with open ears), I have no nostalgia for the long-playing vinyl disc. First, too many of my records has skips, sticks, and scratches, even right out of the sleeve. Second, the snap!crackle!pop! of even the best turntable was an annoying distraction. Third, there was a limit to song length and LP length (unless an artist or record company was willing to shell out extra money for a multiple disc release; too often, except in the money flush mid-70's they weren't). Cds opened up avenues for musical experimentation, and with the advent of home-based MIDI recording technology, anyne with even a modicum of talent can get fairly professional sound reproduction with a few mouse clicks.
Except, too many of these sounds are turned into mp3 files, or itunes - and we are back in the days of tinny sounding songs. What possible use is a machine that gives us ten thousand songs that all sound like one-sided 78s from my father's 1930's record collection?
I suppose technology could fix that problem, too, but I hardly see the point. Even if your mp3 player only holds 200 songs, or five movies, or a few TV shows - what are getting for our convenience? What are we trading for the ability to lock ourselves behind headphones? Part of the joy of listening to music is becoming part of a community of fans who share information, criticism of recordings, go to concerts, share album and song reviews and the like. Now, safely locked away, listening to bad sound recordings, we are no longer part of communities, but individuals, atomized, bereft of the benefits a community of fans and fellow-followers of whatever music one might listen to.
Am I a cranks? Probably. But I am a cranck in a good cause. Music is a powerful force, in the world, in America, in our collective lives. The best music has always been part and parcel of our cultural, social, and political conversation and dialogue. How we listen is as important as what we listen to. I would rather isten to my "old fashioned" compact discs - on a stereo with an equalizer, no less - than the tinny sounds of an mp3 player that held the contents of all 350 of my discs at once. Call me crazy.
