''Life is random'', reads the ad for the newly released iPod Shuffle, the stripped-down offspring of the now ubiquitous iPod personal music player. Developers of the iPod Shuffle were supposedly inspired by the popularity of the shuffle option on the original iPod -- an option that will play the thousands of songs stored on the device in a completely random order.
The iPod Shuffle takes the randomness up a notch, its central feature being the automatic extraction of 180 songs chosen randomly from the digital music collection on your computer. Once loaded onto the tiny music player, these songs now make up your soundtrack for the next day or week until you go back for your next random injection.
I'll leave the analysis of the psychological factors that lead to this widespread fondness for random play up to the sociologically inclined. Surely they could speculate about how it represents people's rejection of choice-making, or is maybe a manifestation of their true belief in fate. If, as the iPod Shuffle's marketing claims, "daily gridlock feels less mundane when you don't know what song will play next," then I guess you could call this new world disorder some sort of shock therapy for all of us who are slaves to routine.
That's not my main concern, however, with this large-scale shuffle, which has a whole generation of music-listeners going about their lives accompanied by their own arbitrary play list -- a sort of personalized radio station broadcasting from their pockets. What's bothering me most about this so-called "random revolution" is the future of its unintended victim, the album.
Seems to me that one thing the shuffle movement does prove is the average music fan's preference for the song over its traditional home. The shuffle option is essentially killing the album, which has long been the music-industry standard for popular music releases. Songs that were played in a very particular order over the past 50 years on vinyl, cassette and CD, have now been ripped from their loving families and thrown into the chaos of the iPods's shuffle. In shuffle mode, there's no more carefully crafted dynamic generated by 12 songs flowing seamlessly from start to finish in a pre-determined order; no more satisfaction of knowing what song comes next and singing along right from the downbeat -- no more album!
I guess I should confess that I, too, am guilty of album butchery, a sin I bear heavily as a musician and album-maker myself. Although I'm not a member of the prestigious iPod owners club (I'll wait to blow my savings on one of those new music-playing phones), the shuffle button on my MP3 Discman (ancient technology now) is well worn from being commanded to rearrange the playing order of the 170 songs, or 15 albums, that can be stored on an MP3 CD. So I can attest to the initial thrill of musical spontaneity that comes from mixing things up.
It's not guilt though, that has me changing my ways. A true feeling of estrangement was what got me thinking about all of this: I realized that the haphazard play list left me craving the subtle drama that my favourite recording artists had achieved by arranging (or simply leaving out) the songs on an album in a specific order in what I know is a carefully thought-out process. Songs were coming at me out of context and with no regard to the style, mood and even the key of the songs preceding and following. It was all too . . . random.
Lately, my music-listening habits have taken a step back in time. I choose the album I feel like listening to and simply press play. No more shuffling around. I've regained an appreciation for the 45-minute journey offered by the truly great LPs of my time and realized that it's really only the best musicians who are able to write enough great songs to fill a full-length album and make it worth listening to the whole way through. The shufflers can keep their one-hit wonders, downloaded hit-single by hit-single.
To be fair, it must be stated that the iPod Shuffle does allow the user to choose what songs get dropped on the player and that they be played sequentially, but this method takes significantly more effort than the "Autofill" option and is marketed as a fringe benefit. I am also aware that straying from the album format happened before these gadgets came along; I'm not too young to remember the personalized mix-tape craze, which was understandably followed by the mix-CD craze. But these were small-scale aberrations, often made as heartfelt gifts with an intended prevailing mood or theme. The indiscriminate randomization of one's entire musical world is altogether different, and is changing drastically the way most of us relate to our music.
So, for now at least, the music coming out of my earphones is -- quite unlike the random life touted in the iPod Shuffle advertisement -- satisfyingly predictable.
Joshua Katz-Rosene lives in Ottawa.