iPod: I love you, you're perfect, now change

There is, however, a problem with the way the iPod encourages you to listen to music -- on the move, as you're out and about in the noisy world. Music portability has changed -- for the worse -- the way engineers record music. To ensure that people can hear new songs in noisy settings, record labels now use a very low dynamic range when they're mastering new albums. This means they set everything in a track -- the vocals, the various instruments -- to be at more or less the same volume, making for few interesting variations during a song between quiet moments and loud moments. To be sure, this is chiefly an audiophile's complaint, one that doesn't bother even most ardent music fans. It goes along with that other common snooty-sounding complaint about the iPod -- that the digital compression required to make the thing work ruins music, especially classical and jazz.

Neither of these problems frustrate the iPod-loving hordes very much, and Levy doesn't address them in his book. I suspect a more widespread issue, though, has to do with the way the iPod seems to work against listening to new music, which has become my chief complaint about the machine. Like many others in the so-called iPod generation, years of surfing the Web have reduced my attention span to not much more time than the length of a typical YouTube clip; consequently, my iPod, stocked with 4,124 songs, routinely turns me into a hyperactive freak show. If you have an iPod, I'm sure you know what I mean. You put on something that you've been wanting to listen to all day. Lucinda Williams' "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" album, say. But you're three-quarters of the way through the first track, and even though you're really digging it, something about the scratchiness of Williams' voice reminds of something else entirely -- the Carter Family. And, hey, don't you have a copy of "Wildwood Flower" on here? Why, yes, you do. So you switch. But of course, putting on the Carter Family is going to remind you of Johnny Cash. And you have the feeling that you must, just this minute, play Cash's version of "In My Life" now. So you switch again. But you're a minute into Johnny and you start to wonder about the Beatles' original version of the track...

The plethora of choice makes taking in something completely new particularly difficult. Listening to an album you've never heard before is work; it requires time, patience, and attention. You can't do it half-assed. But when you play your new album on your iPod, there's always the lure of all those other tracks, and your mind drifts to all that familiar music, all that stuff you know and don't need to work to appreciate. So you inevitably start playing the same stuff over and over. The numbers seem to bear this out -- though iPods can store thousands of songs, the average iPod user's library numbers just about 500 well-worn tracks.

The irony here is that digitization has made acquiring new music particularly easy -- file-sharing networks still work really well, friend, and Apple's one-click purchasing system encourages many impulse purchases. Levy points out, too, that the iPod has eliminated the gap between rock-snob music collectors and the rest of us poseurs. If you've got a friend whose iPod always has the latest, coolest songs on it, all you have to do is plug it in to your machine to acquire the fruits of his taste. (As the New Republic's resident rock aficionado Michael Crowley has noted, this situation greatly concerns the tribe of snobs: "We are being ruined by the iPod.") Thus it's possible, these days, to sort of mindlessly collect music without ever coming to appreciate it.

I remember what I did the first time I heard "Lua," that dreamy Bright Eyes single of a couple years ago. I went to a BitTorrent site and downloaded Conor Oberst's entire oeuvre, more than a gigabyte of music that I've never since played. My iPod's got a whole lot of unplayed Ryan Adams, too, a plunder inspired by the time "The West Wing" featured "Desire" in an episode. A month ago I bought a Dan Reeder album that I've only played one time. I also bought the new Yo La Tengo album -- but every time I try to listen to it, my fingers start to switch to their older stuff. In the past week, I got at least three new albums from various sources; I can listen to them whenever I want, but I don't know if I ever will. More and more, I'm pretty much always playing "OK Computer" -- an album that, not coincidentally, I first came to love when the main thing I used for music was a Discman, and, despite my attention-deficit problems, played constantly for weeks on end.

Levy addresses few of these complaints in his book, and I don't blame him for the omission. It's possible that bitching about the way the iPod has changed the way I listen to music isn't a legitimate gripe about the iPod at all. The iPod is a large portable hard drive that plays music -- it is a logical end-point to decades of technological trends. It arises from the modern condition, and it's the modern condition, more than the iPod itself, that I'm really complaining about. And there is, of course, no going back.

Indeed, we ought to be thankful that if we have to live with something like the iPod, the thing we got is as good as it is. The iPod's not perfect. But for all its flaws, the iPod is just about alone in our world of things in at least striving for perfection. Think about the millions of objects you interact with every day: the computers, the cars, the cookware, the books, the bedding, the furniture, all those clothes. Unless you own a Mercedes or regularly totter about in Manolos, the iPod surely stands out amid your dreary workaday existence: for its beauty; for its sublime function; for the obvious thoughtfulness with which it was made -- the way every detail, from the earbuds to the interface font to the packaging in which it arrives, seems to have been fussed over. "If there was ever a product that catalyzed what's Apple's reason for being, it's this," Jobs told Levy. "Because it combines Apple's incredible technology base with Apple's legendary ease of use with Apple's awesome design... So if anybody was ever wondering why is Apple on earth, I would hold this up as a good example."

Jobs is right. His machine is amazing. I just hope he comes up with something better.

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