I Pod, You Pod

It was approximately 3:30 a.m. I was sitting in my parents’ basement loading my father’s Hank Williams Jr.’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 CD into my brand-new Dell MP3 player when I realized that my Christmas gift may completely ruin my life. The Dell player is basically a clone of Apple’s iPod, which was far from being first on the market but was the first MP3 player to officially go nuclear in cultural terms. For the layperson, the backwoods schlub, the casual music fan and USA Today subscriber, Christmas 2003 marked the exact point at which the iPod Nation stormed Castle Grayskull and effected Rock Zeitgeist regime change.

The sure sign of iPod’s dominion: copycats. It’s not a movement until everyone and his grandma blatantly rips off the market leader’s innovation. Take nü metal, for example. Your grandma totally ruined that shit.

Behold: Every major music mag’s December issue overflowed with ads for iPod rip-offs. A brief whirlwind shopping tour yields fine products manufactured by Dell, Napster, RCA, Sony, Philips, Rio, TDK and the innovatively named iRiver and iRock. Virtually every newspaper and magazine in existence has run compare-and-contrast pieces on the damned things. And “What the kids these days will be downloading on their iPods” has entered the quasi-hipster lexicon of phrases that legally justify repeated blows to the face. Shake it like a Polaroid picture!

The competitive ad blitz notwithstanding, only Apple overlord Steve Jobs scored the gushing Rolling Stone interview, in which he got to crow — alongside an iPod-wielding Sheryl Crow — about Apple selling nearly 1.5 million iPods and peddling 20 million downloads on iTunes, its heavily hyped dollar-a-song service that will single-handedly convince people to stop stealing music — you heartless terrorist bastards. Maybe.

Yet though the illegal downloading racket is a dependable journalistic horse, let us momentarily dismount. Jobs now has unironic titles such as “savior of the desperately fucked-up music industry” attached to his name, but his genius moment may reside in the way — just as he did with the iMac and other Apple products before it — he has made the iPod so goddamned cool.

So cool.

Ice-cold, as Andre 3000 would say.

Consider the utopian ideal presented by the iPod and all its disciples. There you are, your own badass self, hilariously uncomfortable “ear bud” headphones jammed into your skull, with 5,000 of your favorite songs dumped into a cigarette-pack-sized computer set on “shuffle” so you can veer erratically from King Tubby to King’s X to King Missile’s “Detachable Penis” as you pick up the dry cleaning. Radio has failed you. Portable CD players once limited you. But now you’re an all-powerful DJ, with the single most dangerous item in your home — your CD collection — in the palm of your hand.

As a violent expression of your cultural identity, an iPod is as lethal as a concealed Glock. The old High Fidelity mantra that “You are what you like” still holds true, and nothing declares what you like more forcefully than your CD collection. Most people collect CDs solely to arrange them — alphabetically and then by release date, of course — in a comically oversized CD rack and just stare at ’em, arms outstretched, beaming: This Is Who I Am, the divine accumulation of my fabulous eclecticism. And in an earthquake, Who I Am can tip over and literally crush me.

And now you can stuff Who I Am down your pants if you suspect you’re about to be mugged.

For those of us who don’t own firearms, CD collections serve as the classic extension-of-ego trophy — cultural superiority through pure quantity, pure volume. You don’t collect wildly eclectic CDs because you enjoy wildly eclectic music. You collect wildly eclectic CDs because you want people to think you enjoy wildly eclectic music. The iPod and its ilk have simply made this self-aggrandizing process easy and portable.

Wired magazine recently noted the “playlisting” phenomenon on college campuses, wherein students list their entire iPod contents online, allowing them to choose (or reject) romantic prospects based entirely on the artists contained therein. Chumps with too much Candlebox and not enough Can are now more easily kicked to the curb.

But it’s all a guise, a façade — iPods have only made it easier to hide who you really are. Fact: 80 percent of your CD collection hardly ever gets played. Most folks claim wildly sprawling tastes but secretly blast the same eight CDs in continual rotation. We like repetition. We like familiarity. Stop lying to yourself and using the contents of your iPod to lie to others. Admit the truth.

I’ll start: For about two weeks, the only song I’d play in my car was “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne.

Fuck, that was embarrassing. Never mind.

MP3 players are deadly in the way they appeal to the narcissistic record-collector geek in all of us, rendering us drooling, baggy-eyed, obsessive-compulsive fools who painstakingly type in album after album and track name after track name until everything is absolutely perfect. I personally am infuriated by my Dell’s refusal to accept Pop as a U2 album — despite loading several of my mother’s U2 records into the damn thing, it insists on listing Pop separately, as some sort of parallel-universe U2, perhaps trying to banish into solitary confinement the band’s lemon-riding, irony-overloaded electronica phase.

Smart computers, these. Perhaps too smart. Perhaps deadly in the way they slyly appeal to our look-how-varied-my-tastes-are vanity. Enjoy your iPods and iPod clones, kids — they’re fantastic inventions, truly life-altering. But make sure you’re carrying them around and not the other way around. Or else you might find yourself listening to Hank Williams Jr.’s “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” for what you suddenly realize is no reason, no damn reason at all. Talkin’ ’bout a revolution. Music geeks get a pocket protector for the new millennium.