The iPod Project

I love music. I do. But I am not a music person. I don't need to see bands live, I don't follow the trials and tribulations of rock stars, and I don't own a single concert t-shirt. It is something of a joke in our household that I can listen to the radio on scan without really noticing, and I prefer the comfortable predictability of the original recording- no live bootleg or "unplugged" version for me, thank you very much. I grew up with folk music, and my senior quote in the yearbook was from a John Denver song; not even one of the classics that everyone sort of kind of loves despite themselves; no. It was from a little known John Denver song, from his last album. It rhymed.

Hell, let's just lay it all on the table. Earlier that same year, I visited my ex-boyfriend at his new college dorm and thought it was so cool that he had a Nirvana sticker over his bedroom door, that he was invoking the Buddhist concept of peace of mind, or "highest happiness," for his personal space. What's that you say? Nirvana is the name of a band? That's right: it was 1992 and I had never heard of the band Nirvana. In fact, I still sometimes have to check myself and make sure that that was the one with Kurt Cobain. (My husband is blushing deeply in shame reading this, as are, I would guess, plenty of my friends.) My Junior year in college I similarly failed to recognize a Grateful Dead sticker pasted to the wall of my own dorm room- aren't those little bears cute? I asked a friend.

Need I go on?

The understanding that music is related to cool, and that shame in not knowing, in being outside of music culture, is something I encountered first at Vassar. I remember senior year my friend Hal, who was a DJ at our college radio station, talking about the identity-projecting power of music; how carefully he had considered the first album- the first song- that he would play upon setting up his stereo in his dorm room. I tried to think what my first song would have been, but couldn't remember: I had been too busy deciding between my various cheerleading t-shirts to announce myself at orientation, and what I remember about projected identity was Stacy Billis's choice of striped socks.

But I still remember that my freshman year roommate Emily's favorite band was called Trip Shakespeare and that, like me, they hailed from the Twin Cities. That my other freshman roommate, Jen, listened to rap. (Rap!) I associate Hal with Yo La Tengo and Fugazi, and Sarah and Chris with Dolly Parton- perhaps not directly "cool," but coolly ironic, in a way. I think it's telling that I cannot associate any friends before or since with one particular musician, except Marni, whose intense and everlasting love of Bon Jovi has led friends and family to buy her onesies with his likeness for her baby boy. I do know that my college friends wanted to talk about music a lot, and that I was not only unable to compare this guitarist to that one, but I had, in most cases, never even heard of the bands they played in. I didn't really understand the whole band thing, if truth be known; I was more of a singer-songwriter kind of a girl. I was enamored of a particular one at the time (no, you haven't heard of her), and when asked I would name her as a favorite musician, sensing that James Taylor was the wrong answer (and wondering if I should bury the evidence, as it were: there were 13 of his albums organized in alphabetical order in the sleeves of my CD case.)

At various points, I did try to learn, but music was a foreign language to me, despite having a vocabulary of treble clefs and crescendos from years of playing the flute. Music culture was its own language, and it went deep into iconography and subgenres and the band-hopping of various bassists. I was unequipped to discuss the differences between The Cure and The Smiths, or The Smiths and Morrisey, though I did learn that Morrisey was the latter band's former lead singer. I still do not understand the difference between house and hip hop, or the various divisions of electronica. It makes me nervous not to know how to talk about something, I feel vulnerable not to be a native speaker, and because of this, I gave up. I shut myself down to music.

My husband Dave started to open me back up. He introduced me to many bands, and never judged when I did not remember or could not recognize their style from one song to the next. He made me guess the band when we heard various songs on the radio to demonstrate how much I did know, to rebuild my confidence, and he did not laugh when I got it wrong, even when the band had as distinctive a sound as Green Day or Guns n Roses. He paid attention to what I seemed to like, and found more in the same vein. When we moved to Boulder, we decided to leave our TV behind in Brooklyn; for me, this had something to do with wanting more music in our lives. To simply remember the pleasure of it, and to pass that on to our daughters from an early age.

A couple of years ago, I asked for an iPod for Christmas. This was a funny request, because in addition to not being a music person, I am not a gadget person: I lose them, I break them, I can't be bothered to learn how to work them. I went through as many cell phones before giving up as I went through retainers in my youth, before my dentist finally glued a bar to the back of my front teeth, which have a tendency to gap. I also hate to have anything in my ears, prefer to listen to ambient sound and overheard conversations on the subway and the street, and was generally against what I saw as the tyranny of the iPod ad campaign. So why did I ask for one? In my memory, Dave did a whole big sell on me, talking me into it (for some reason, he did not want one himself, though I suspected he wanted to have access to one and would use mine when I did not.) But Dave claims that, after many protestations against the iPod, I suddenly, out of the blue, said I would like one. But not for music: no; I was going to listen to podcasts. It would be for education, for information.

My parents were nice enough to get me a shiny white Nano in a hard plastic display case, where it would remain, unused, for many many months, until Dave finally uploaded some podcasts from The Moth, a storytelling group in New York that I have long loved, sat me on the couch, and forced me to listen to them. It was funny to sit in my living room and to go on this private auditory journey. Yet back in the box it went.

Recently though, I started commuting 30 or more miles--each way--to my job in Denver, and readers of this blog might remember that the antenna in our car was stolen during our last days in Brooklyn. Out of necessity, the iPod project was born. Using one of those tape cassette converters (yes, the car has a cassette deck), I can listen to music (or, i suppose, podcasts) during the commute. And you know what? Something wonderful has happened. I do listen to music, and I decide whether or not I like it.

I know, this does not sound revolutionary. But because I have spent the last decade or more feeling like I was missing something where music was involved, feeling like my opinion was not trustworthy, it is a revolution for me. Without the album art or even the artist's name to go on, I have no pre-conceived notions of what I will hear. I don't have a clue whether I am "supposed" to like it, whether or not it is popular--even revered. I feel the freedom of making up my own mind. Every day, I have these little revelations: That's Antony and the Johnsons? I don't get the hype. Blonde Redhead's sound surprised me: for some reason the name evoked something much harder than what I actually heard. And you know what? Yo La Tengo is everything everyone said back in college, and it occurs to me to wonder whether I ever actually listened to them then.

Now, of course, there is a filter for all of this: Dave is loading the songs, and Dave has very good taste. But he is also experimenting, putting things on there that he doesn't know much--or anything about. Every morning, I email Dave a report when I get to work, telling him what I like and don't like. And every evening, when I return from work, we talk over the reviews of the day. And it's fun. It's fun because Dave actually likes to talk about music with me-- me, who does not speak the language. Who will likely never be able to classify anything by genre. Who will probably continue to mix up Peaches and The Moldy Peaches, even though they have nothing in common except that I kind of like them both. It's fun because there is no right or wrong. And of course--silly me--because it is music, described as a joyful noise; banned in some religions and cultures because it is too powerful, too inciteful, too likely to lead to dangerous pleasures; held aloft in boomboxes in movies-and sometimes daily life--to express something we feel deeply when we do not have the words.

Because sometimes speaking the language is beside the point; the pleasure is in the experience.