Just when you thought the iPod beat was all but played out, the Washington Post adds another piece to the mix. Linton Weeks’ tale (headlined “Go-Go-Go Beat: From Elevator to Anywhere, There’s No Stopping the Music”) leads with an insider’s look at one man’s iPod tunes of choice. Not George Bush, not Michael Phelps, not even poker champion Daniel Negreanu, whose iPod playlists are all old news at this point. What the Post has managed to expose is what Roberto Cabrera, a “slightly mustachioed” University of Maryland student who “says that music is a mega-massive part of his life” (note the lack of quotes around “mega-massive”… it confused us, too) listens to on his iPod.
Now that’s what we call news, baby.
Weeks writes with a sort of grandfatherly awe at these crazy kids and their newfangled music machines. He notes in the first paragraph that Cabrera’s headphones connect him to “more than 5,000 songs that he downloaded from CDs and the Internet.” (Downloading songs from the Internet? You mean the Internet has songs??) He then estimates how long it would take to listen to all of Cabrera’s songs — failing to note that iTunes actually provides an exact figure of how many days, hours, minutes and seconds of music your library holds, right there at the bottom of the screen.
It’s not so suprising that Weeks is a year or two late on the “people listening to their iPods” story when you learn that he’s half a decade late on his next discovery — “people listening to their compact disc players.” He takes us on a brief tour of people listening to music on all sorts of portable devices while they walk to work, while they ride the subway, while they sit at Starbucks. These kids — so many of them can walk and chew gum at the same time! Weeks dubs them the “musicholics,” and apparently they’re all over Washington!
Who knew?
Fortunately, this 2,600-word exposition does not drag on to infinitude with not-very-interesting looks at where and when not-very-interesting people listen to their not-very-interesting MP3 players. Soon enough Weeks’ fascination with music-playing devices gives way, making room for his fascination with — the very existence of music!
There’s been a deluge of updates on the latest iPod trends, accoutrements, and celebrity playlists in the past few years (a New York Times online search of “iPod,” for instance, yields 388 hits in the last year alone). But this is where Weeks separates himself from the pack. It’s not every day you come across one writer’s discovery of music itself. As Weeks writes, “certain melodies inspire, arouse, invigorate. Others provoke, insult, infuriate. As we’ve learned from watching decades of movies and TV shows, effective music can move us to tears and to cheers.” Like the rhyme? Then you’ll love Weeks’ highly alliterative characterization of our time: “The Era of the Ear, the Epoch of Omnipresent Song, this miraculous Age of Ubiquitous Music.”
Weeks does bring in some opinions and research from leading experts, such as one Richard Restak, who says that music can “evoke an extremely intense experience,” and Mark Tramo, “a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School who believes that music is a universal language.” Sounds like some groundbreaking research. (In fact, it’s a shame the New York Times, which has covered some fairly controversial research recently, missed out on the hot lead that some view music as a universal language.)
Kudos to the Post for such a sensationally sweet, oddly onomatopoetic, extremely excellent exclusive expose!
Tomorrow’s episode: Some people watch moving pictures on monitors built inside plastic boxes. Really!
–Samantha Henig
Samantha Henig was a CJR Daily intern.