Life in a Music Desert - Part II
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Living in a Music Desert, Part II
This week, I’ll continue ruminating on the topic that I wrote about in my last post: music, or the current lack thereof. Although my life as of late has been woefully bereft of music, there was a time that music was the air that I breathed. During my teen years, I collected music like my life depended on it, downloading songs and making mix CDs that charted my volatile emotional landscape. I cherished my music collection—recordings of live shows, ironic cover songs, epically emo songs that went on for 10 melancholic minutes.
They say that those hormone-driven teen years infuse music with more meaning than any other time in our life. And there’s science to back up the theory. According to this New York Times data analysis, our music preferences peak around the end of puberty, meaning that if you loved a song as a teen, you’ll likely love it forever.
My father left behind his music collection from his youth—boxes and boxes of records, each one stored faithfully in paper sleeves and then its cardboard cover. They’re in great condition, and every now and then, I pick one of his records out of the pile, lay it onto the record player, and lower the needle. Spanish guitar, every Pink Floyd album—I immerse myself in the records that brought my father joy.
My music collection lived on my computer’s hard drive. I spent hours watching songs get downloaded from the internet—illegal, I know, but still, so delicious. From my computer, I’d transfer my music to my iPod so I always had thousands of my favorite songs on hand. One unfortunate day, my computer hard drive crashed. There was no way to transfer the music from my iPod to a computer, although I tried, and so the music collection lived on in the iPod, which I cherished, until that died too. It wasn’t that long ago, maybe five years back, that my music collection evaporated.
Lately I’ve been thinking about all the obscure recordings that I listened to over and over again, as if they were religious psalms. I think about the fact that I can never reconstitute that music collection, songs collected during a period of my life that I can never re-live. Like a collector, I picked up music everywhere I went—from every person, every experience, every place. Those songs spoke to my soul in a way that music simply doesn’t anymore. Is it because I’m not a hormone-driven teen anymore? Or is it because I’ve lost my beloved music collection?
“Don’t you have Spotify?” my friend Selena asks when she hears my lament.
I do, but it’s not the same. I add music to my Spotify account, but for some reason, I do so half-heartedly. Endless music is available to me on Spotify, and yet, it’s not truly mine. I download albums onto my iPod touch so I can listen to them offline (since I’m often offline—at home without wi-fi or away from the network while on a road trip or flight), but then Spotify decides that my time of “owning” this album has expired. The songs I want to listen to are listed in the app, but the titles are faded grey instead of highlighted white, indicating that these songs are no longer available offline. Time and time again, I am let down. I get frustrated. I give up on music.
Scanning through my Spotify music library, I don’t feel connected to the artists or their songs. It’s a haphazard collection created from this endless sea of music, a collection crafted from gluttony instead of shrewd discernment. Back during my teen years, when I was pilfering music off the internet, I had to choose wisely. A single song could take hours to download. It’s a bit like using a film camera vs snapping shots with a digital camera. We can take pictures with wild abandon, without taking real care to set up the shot, to hold our breath because this is our one chance.
The internet has given us endless choice when it comes to music, but apps like Pandora and Spotify have also taken away ownership of our music collection. Yes, we have access to music via these apps, but the music is not ours outright.
“Should I start buying music?” I ask my husband. “Then I will actually own my music, and I can listen to whatever I want whenever I want!”
Is this the solution? Will paying 99 cents per song on iTunes solve my music problem? Or is the problem purely nostalgia: that my son will never get to thumb through my records, wondering who I was way back when.
I wonder—even if I still had my beloved music collection, would I be tuning into these old loves of mine? Or would I choose to spend my time more industriously, by listening to an audio book, catching up with the news, or tuning into a conversation between smart thinkers on a podcast?
From the Audience: Digital Life Hacks
Rosie writes in from France: After reading [last week's newsletter], I decided to take out my headphones on my walk/sloooow jog and listen to the birds and leaves rustling around and it was actually super calming and didn’t sap my motivation at all. I think I will repeat it in the future! Thanks for the idea and I love you!
Digital Life Around the Web
I am watching: Infinite Scroll short film
I am enjoying: Disconnecting Connection award-winning photo series by Al Lapkovsky
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