In yet one more sop to the iPod cultists, The Guardian solicited comments from two of its critics, Kitty Empire (pop music) and Anthony Holden (classical and opera). First up, Kitty Empire:
Like the Walkman, the iPod sticks two fingers up at John Donne's dictum that no man is an island. Personal stereo wearers are all islands; but the iPodder has his or her very own instalment of Desert Island Discs with them. What's more, instead of just eight songs, you get six gigabytes of songs (1,500 tracks). And that's just the iPod mini. The massive 60-gig 15,000 tracker is (to badly paraphrase Nathan Barley) totally archipelago.Make no mistake, what you programme into your iPod says things about you.
I like it. Although I appreciate the "archipelago" comment more for its linguistic novelty than for its application to me, because I don't use my iPod Mini to shut out the world (with one exception, which I'll talk about below). And she's absolutely right about your iPod contents saying things about you. In my case, you'll see plenty of Maria Callas, plenty of Beethoven piano and all of the late string quartets, The Killers, Verve Remixed 2, and Pimsleur's Russian and French lessons. Her thoughts on the nature of the digitization of music are worthy of a thought or two as well.
Next up is Anthony Holden, the paper's classical and opera critic:
Something new? Well, I could listen to that on my hi-fi. Store my day's writing? I've got a memory-stick for that. Take it on holiday, or on my travels? Yes, there is that - especially when I play in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas next month, to insulate myself from the babble. And, come to think of it, on the long-haul flights each way. And, yes, on holiday, if I ever get one... OK, I'm beginning to see the point of this thing.[...]
But for me, except on distant travels, it's back to the real thing.
"The real thing," in Holden's case? "I attend three or four concerts or operas a week, while auditioning scores of CDs to select the handful I recommend in these pages." As a Guardian critic, too, Holden gets his music free, as he admits. But I do not live in such a rarefied environment -- culturally, El Paso is no London -- and for me, the iPod definitely has its uses, even if they amount, largely, to what Holden would do with the thing.
For when I'm at home, in my library, I move to my stereo when I wish to hear music. Why bother with the iPod? But when I'm elsewhere, on the road for my employer, then my iPod Mini makes its value known. In hotel rooms I have none of my Beethoven or Beatles CDs, nor my stereo. But I do have the music.
Airports are generally too noisy for the iPod to be of much use, but on the plane itself, ah...yes. In fact, I recently learned, on a flight from Atlanta to El Paso, that I'd screwed up in iTunes, and when transferring my Pimsleur French to the iPod, I'd somehow managed to put Lessons 1 and 2, followed by Lessons 1 and 2 again, onto the same track in the playlist. Very, very cool: I just sat back and went through it, both lessons and the repeats, just as I probably would have done anyway.
So while it's true that I don't use it much at home, it's also true that I love my iPod Mini. Now I just have to put the rest of the Russian and French lessons on the thing the way I did with those first two French lessons...
Posted by Craig Ceely at June 4, 2005 10:52 PM