How do you listen to your CDs?
A very long time ago, a friend taught me a brilliant rule to follow for whether or not you buy a CD: If you like three songs, you will probably like the CD. If you like fewer than three songs, you won’t like the rest of the CD. I’ve found that rule to be pretty much foolproof. I also tend to be very picky with the CDs that I actually buy. Well, and then there’s the obsessive part of my sometimes obessive-compulsive behavior: I have, on more than one occasion, gotten so enamoured of a song/artist/CD that I’ve gone out with minutes to spare before closing time just to buy a CD from the record store. The last time I got that obessed, I discovered that a local music store stocked the CD that I wanted, and went there on my way home from work that day.
In any case. I tend to listen to an entire CD, from beginning to end. If I’m listening in my car (I tape them; I never got a CD player for the Jeep, what with it being a super-easy target for thieves), I will rewind the tape to the first song if it isn’t already there. And sometimes, I get out of the car and pop the CD into the player at home and start it exactly where the tape left off.
Do you listen to your CDs in order? Or are you a shuffler?
I’m planning on getting an iPod, but I don’t think I can ever really be a shuffler. When I hear one song by an artist, I tend to want to hear more songs by that artist.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that this seems to be true for all folk music CDs I own, but only about half the rock CDs. The three-song rule works for the harder stuff, but I confess there are more than a few songs that I skip on my rock CDs, and almost none on the folk CDs.
So. How do you listen to your music? Are you a serial musicologist, or do you flutter from group to group?
Depends on the era, Meryl. But considering the fact that most of my life resides in the non-shuffle era, I would consider myself (primarily) a serial musicologist (whereas the new stuff I hear I seem to like to shuffle). Funny, ain’t it?
Serial, definitely. I believe that if the creator of the CD put the tracks in a certain order, he/she did so for a reason. (I realize that this may apply much more to CDs produced by independent artists, who have more control over their work, than to those produced by large record companies, which have their own considerations.)
I remember deciding on the order of the songs on my CD together with my producer back in 2000. Perhaps times have changed now that MP3 players are so widespread, and now it wouldn’t matter as much.
I started to respond to the question heading up this post, but, a bit like The Lord Of The Rings, the tale grew in the telling. I ran it by Meryl, who said to go ahead and post it anyway. (“It may be long, but it’s interesting” — Meryl)
I’ll bet Meryl knew I was going to overboard on a question like this.
Last year, I was picking my 10-year-old daughter up at a friend’s house after a birthday party. For my walk over there to pick her up, I took along my Panasonic walkman so I could listen to some music. One of the little girls at the party saw my walkman and asked what it was. Without betraying any surprise at the question, I told her it played cassette tapes, and then opened it up and pulled out the tape, in case she’d never seen one before. Somehow, she seemed frustrated by this odd-looking device. She screwed up her face and said conclusively, “You need a new one.”
This is one reason I feel like a musical Luddite.
I still make mix tapes of various artists (or various tracks from one artist) and listen to them when I’m doing my two-mile morning walk around my Brooklyn neighborhood or other chores. I’ve been making an annual “Big Hits Of The Year” tape for one of my sisters since 1981, and still do. “You’re the last person in the world who’s still making mix tapes,” my ex-wife told me not too long ago. But I can get 110 minutes of music on one tape, which is nearly a half hour more than you could fit on a CD. And walkmen are far more shock-resistant than discmen, which gives cassettes another advantage over CDs.
When I commute to work on the subway, I switch to a discman, and listen to CDs. Working more or less in the music business, a lot of CDs of every genre still fall into my lap and I’m happy to give anything a spin, because you never know what’ll be good. (By the time a CD makes it into my briefcase, however, I’ve probably already listened to it once or twice and have deemed it a keeper.) I prefer to listen to CDs from beginning to end, the way the artist and producer intended it to be digested. (That’s the way I watch movies and read books, too.) When it comes to cassettes, I’ll do the programming myself, but otherwise, I’m still an album listener.
When I was reviewing several albums every week for Billboard, I’d often end up with an album that had only one or two good cuts on it, so I recorded those cuts onto cassettes marked “Various.” I have around 100 or so 90-minute audiocassettes from those days. I knocked off that practice when my daughter was born, because the whole process was too time-consuming for somebody with a child to take care of.
My daughter treats my ex-wife and me like abusive parents because we haven’t gotten her an iPod, a status item most of her friends already have. Even if we did get her one, she wouldn’t be able to use it because the operating system on my computer is too antiquated for something like that — but I’m about to get an actual, present-day computer which would eliminate that excuse.
As one who spent a decade at Billboard, I hold no brief for illegal downloading or file-sharing. My sympathy goes out to musicians, who have enough cards stacked against them already, so violating their copyrights is plainly theft as far as I’m concerned. The same goes for burning copies of CDs for other people. I won’t do it. Pulling a track here or there is basically okay, but I couldn’t bring myself to copy an entire album wholesale. (And give it to somebody else of course. There’s no shame in copying something for yourself, as Meryl does for her Jeep.)
Now legal downloading is fine with me, but I’m not likely to be one of those people who pulls one or two songs off an album and puts it on my iPod (if I had one). If an album has only one or two good songs, then I doubt I’d listen to that particular artist. (People usually cite such drecky pop stars as Britney Spears as the type who can’t fill a whole album with decent material. Since everybody pretty much agrees that that’s true, why anyone would listen to artists like that in the first place?) There is also the technical issue of data-compression, which makes music files smaller and thus more portable. I’ve never been much of an audiophile, so I might not notice the difference, but I’ve been told by some people that they hate the loss of sound that compression causes.
One final point, to which Meryl might relate. Our daughter’s Hebrew School class had to memorize a couple songs to be sung at an upcoming service. Her teacher put the two songs into sound-files and e-mailed them to all the parents, with a note that these would be easy for us to download onto our kids’ iPods. My wife and I were both a bit miffed at the assumption that every kid in Hebrew School must certainly have an iPod. (Although given the sometimes astounding affluence of the families in our synagogue, that certainly wasn’t an off-base assumption.) Still, we wrote her back and told her that it seemed a bit presumptuous for her to assume that of course we’ve all shelled out hundreds of dollars for this newest gadget. We also told her that we always figured the purpose of a spiritual education was to teach something distinct from — even opposed to — the pervasive culture of materialism and consumerism through which our children must navigate. The teacher was contrite about it to us, but I also wonder if she didn’t think we were a couple of weirdos for not getting our kid an iPod like everybody else has. We downloaded the music files on to our computer desktop and our little girl practiced them at the computer.
I’m sure that we won’t be able to resist the rising tide much longer and will probably let some grandparent or other buy our daughter an iPod for her next birthday. At least we held out as long as we could before raising the white flag.