Month: October 2006

So when you see an article titled “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change”, is your first instinct to self-induce an epileptic seizure? Because mine is.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the twitching wildly on the floor. I read this piece (by the often perceptive Farhad Manjoo) and was quite impressed. Posing as a review (really a sideways poking at but who’s counting?) of Steven Levy’s new book “The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness” Farhad wings in one layered observations after another, pointing out his own biases yet maintain a rigid curiousity.

Witness:

So you come to Levy’s book with justified fear that this is going to be a valentine, one whose depth of feeling threatens to turn embarrassing. There’s not only the hagiographic title but also the book cover, which mimics the look of the iPod, and the flow of the text itself: In order to “spiritually link my book to its subject,” Levy has written a collection of free-standing pieces, allowing every copy to have a different — that is, “Shuffled” — arrangement. By the time you learn this, you’re quite prepared for Levy to divulge that he’s also named his kids Mini and Nano, so far does his iPod lust seem to go. You want to tell him to take his Shuffle and get a room.

And on himself…

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…

This is a great piece about a subject I could never hear about again and be delighted. Well done, Mr. Manjoo. Now please, use whatever influence you have to get Mr. Jobs on iPod: The Next Generation.