| I've never been someone who's like, 'Music is gonna change the world.' It's not just single-handedly music. But [music reflects] the way that people think, the things that people are attached to, the passion that people have for wanting to see positive change. | |  |  | | Leyla McCalla at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, April 29, 2022. | | (Erika Goldring/Getty Images) | | | | quote of the day | | "I've never been someone who's like, 'Music is gonna change the world.' It's not just single-handedly music. But [music reflects] the way that people think, the things that people are attached to, the passion that people have for wanting to see positive change." | | - Leyla McCalla | |
| | rantnrave:// | bye, Pod
Congratulations, APPLE, for an exquisitely Apple-esque announcement in which it announces that it's ceased production of the last surviving IPOD by literally not announcing that it's ceased production of anything. Find me a word in here about what Apple has actually stopped doing. I'll wait, as they say. Everybody, of course, understood what Apple was saying, either because Apple gave them a head's up offline, or they'd already read it somewhere else, or they just kind of figured it out. Which is pretty much how it's always worked with Apple. Has anyone ever read one of the company's instruction manuals for anything? Of course not. You just kind of follow the crowd, or play around until things start making sense.
"iPod touch will be available while supplies last" was, I have to admit, a pretty good clue in bold type at the top of Tuesday's official announcement. But normally a sentence like that goes at the end, after you've explained why that's suddenly an issue. The iPod touch, it turns out, is being discontinued, and that will be the end of the iPod line, born 21 years ago in October 2001. The seventh generation iPod touch, introduced in 2019—a fact I learned yesterday—is where it all ends. But its spirit lives on because, and I quote, "the experience of taking one's music library out into the world has been integrated across Apple's product line — from iPhone and Apple Watch to iPad and Mac." Sort of? I guess? I have iPhone. I have APPLE MUSIC. I do not have N'DEA DAVENPORT's 1998 self-titled album and neither do they. And even if I did, I have no idea how I'd move a digital copy of that album from my computer to my phone. That knowledge, and for all I know that ability, is long gone. What's the last time you intentionally moved an MP3 or WAV file from your MacBook to your iPhone? Would you know how?
It started way back when with an exquisitely designed white pocket-sized device, with a wheel that clicked when you turned it, that could hold way more music than any other device that had ever fit in one of your pockets (especially if you were cool with 128k MP3s, which most of us were). It had a little heft to it, which gave it gravitas. It was easy to use. It made sense. It connected to iTunes, which also used to make sense.
As elegant as its design was, the iPod didn't do anything you couldn't do before. Portable MP3 players existed. The ability to copy, curate, reorder and share your music in slightly degraded form had been available for decades thanks to cassette tape, and the WALKMAN had long allowed you to carry at least some of it around in your pocket. But the iPod made everything faster, easier, bigger, more immediate, more fun. It was to cassettes and other MP3 players what the Twitter retweet button was to cutting-and-pasting someone's tweet and adding the letters "RT" at the top. It was the better version. The simpler version. The viral version.
The iPod alone didn't disrupt the hierarchy of the album or elevate the single over the album—the '20s and '30s and '50s and '60s and '80s and '90s had already done a good job of that—or turn music into ones and zeroes (does anyone remember CDs?) or invent the art of personal curation. But it moved the needle on all those things and more, and heralded a seismic change in music consumption, which in turn would herald a significant change in music production. It was a beginning and an end. A beginning of the era of neither the single nor the album, but just, simply, the track. A beginning of instant access, which streaming would soon come around and put on steroids. A beginning of what would become the celestial jukebox. But where the celestial jukeboxes of RHAPSODY, SPOTIFY, BEATS MUSIC and APPLE MUSIC would give everyone access to the same bottomless collection of music, the iPod was a kind of last hurrah of an era when we all had different, personally curated collections in our pockets. The end of ownership, at least in the way that ownership used to be understood. There are plenty of great private collections, big and small, today. You may well have one. But everyone used to have one. And for many of them, the iPod was its final resting place.
Rest in iPeace, iPod. Your spirit does live on, not integrated across Apple's product line, but integrated across all of us.
Rest in Peace
SHIVKUMAR SHARMA, virtuoso of the santoor, a 100-stringed Indian hammered dulcimer, and Bollywood composer... Drummer TOMMY MCCONNELL of '80s funk/disco band Skyy... Canadian pop singer/songwriter SUSAN JACKS, best known as lead singer of the late '60s, early '70s pop group the Poppy Family. In later years she became a country songwriter in Nashville.
| | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | |
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