I invented the iPod. Or, at least, I invented the iPod that’s currently on my desk. In 1970, an avid music-lover, with hundreds of LP’s in my collection (no, for those of you too young to know, I won’t define LP), I dreamed of having a portable way of listening to all of my music. I called it my “universal jukebox.” I couldn’t envision the actual technology, of course, but I imagined a kind of personal radio, with me as the DJ, spinning only my records, at the touch of a button. (I also invented the compilation CD, but that’s another story.) 

Today, I have 3 iPods. One has all my contemporary classical, from Karlheinz Stockhausen to John Adams. One has approximately 20,000 tracks, mostly from the last 10 years, ripped from CDs, downloaded from iTunes, and free downloads (not a single one illegal) from sites like 3Hive and Daytrotter. My universal jukebox, though, is my 30 gig iPod classic with 670 albums, all ripped from CDs, every great album from the 60’s, 70’s and a few from later decades, what I call the “canon.”I’d like to say that this iPod lives up to the dream of it I had almost 40 years ago. In some ways, it does. I play it on shuffle, for the most part, and I love the juxtaposition — a great Beatles song followed by Hindu Rodeo’s Hindu Rodeo (the greatest rock song of the 90’s, bar none) — or a Joni Mitchell ballad followed by an early Black Sabbath ear-bleeder. And, no denying, being able to have this in my car or on my desk at work, is incredibly convenient. But, what do I give up in return for portability and serendipity? Number one, sound quality. Most of my albums didn’t survive the MP3 compression (some do), so what I hear is only a simulacrum. The death of the album cover has been much mourned. Now I get a postage stamp image of the album art. What’s next, a micro-dot?

Most of all, though, I lose a sense of scale. When I was 17, each new album was a big event. I somehow thought that having them all together would result in a compounding magnitude–THE UNIVERSAL JUKEBOX!! Instead, I can hold my entire canon in the palm of my hand, and all in all it’s not much bigger than that. And, it’s not just me. For my daughters, both avid iPod Touch owners, music is not only a much smaller thing in their lives, it’s far more disposable. Three years from now they’ll have new iPods with new track lists, and the old songs will have been lost in the transition from handheld to handheld, from computer to computer. Contrast that with how I had to have successive LP, cassette, and CD copies of, say, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. 

Yes, myriad mistakes made by the record labels are largely to blame if music doesn’t mean as much to us as it once did, but the technology has played its part too. I’d love to think the resurgent popularity of vinyl could take us all the way back to the way I bought my copy of the Beatles’ White Album — I plucked it from a little rack in a drug store the day it came out and hugged it to my chest.

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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.

Latest posts by Christopher Guerin (Posts)

• A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Seurat) - August 3, 2013
• Hyde Mill (Sandy Ellarson) - July 27, 2013
• Hands and Feet (Alice Bea Guerin) - July 20, 2013
• Cafe Terrace at Night (Van Gogh) - July 13, 2013
• Winter Landscape (Sesshu) - July 6, 2013

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