In Defense Of Anything But MP3 Players And Marshall McLuhan

By Tom O’Hare / Brutish &Short

I bought my iPod in January 2010. For what it’s worth, It was my first mp3 player, so interpret that how you will, or take it as a disclaimer. Nonetheless, I'd decided I should have one for the three month trip to India I was about to embark on. Firstly, I would need music to avoid going insane on the subcontinent, because, as a rule, I need music to avoid going insane; secondly, carrying around a book of a hundred CDs would not be practical, and lastly, $60 is a pretty good deal for a brand new iPod Touch. (My cousin sold it to me, and I never bothered to ask if it was stolen or re-gifted, because I don't honestly care.)

Needless to say, it was something of a revelation. Not that I had been against iPods by any stretch, but I had certainly been a skeptic—one of those assholes who's always wondering why faux party DJs get an itchy trigger finger and become so not sonically well-mannered parties, with their, "oh, wait, wait, wait! Here's a good one!" Click. I hate that shit, and, along with my perpetual poverty, it was enough to keep me solidly in the "CDs are good enough for me" camp for many years.

So then I got an iPod, and things were good. Because I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on planet earth who's listened to “Dragon’s Lair” while gaping at the Taj Mahal.

But then, a month ago, things changed abruptly. My iPod broke. The headphone jack stopped working. I stopped receiving sound from the left speaker. This is an annoyance that cannot be overcome by virtue of sheer willpower, or perseverance. This is a crippling deficiency. Listening to a single headphone is absurd at best. At worst, it's maddening. And since entropy has a way of targeting me directly, my iPod quickly drove me insane.

Until I stopped using it.

I first heard Bon Iver on a mix CD that my brother's girlfriend had compiled for him. I think it was probably “Skinny Love” that made me shiver most, though I confess to not remembering—there were a couple of his songs on there, and they were all mindbogglingly good. At any rate, I promptly bought For Emma, Forever Ago and obsessed for a few months. I was painting houses at the the time, and I remember just completely not giving a shit when other contractors would show up (the house I was painting at the time had a lot of problems; there were lots of contractors) and hear me listening to plaintive, lonely folk, because it was beautiful, and because not every house painter gives a damn about your make-believe machismo—at least, not all the time. (Sometimes, I confess, we do.) The album would end, I'd hang my paint on the ladder, climb down, and press play again. I'd swat a mosquito. I'd climb back up the ladder. I'd make it through the day with my cigarettes and my boombox.

So I'm kind of one of those guys who was anticipating the new Bon Iver record, the appropriately self titled, Bon Iver. I got it from a friend after streaming it on NPR for a couple of days. (In addition to being poor, I am also irrationally afraid of torrents.) The point here is that I burned it to a CD, because I can't stand listening to my tinny computer speakers, and because, as I mentioned, my iPod is broken.

I've spent the better part of my life listening to music—on vinyl, in compact disc form, on tape, and finally, courtesy of Steve Jobs—but I still don't understand it. Here I am reduced to listening to CDs again, waxing nostalgic to understand the intersection of technology and aesthetics and how various media informs how we receive art.

Which brings us to the part of the essay where I talk about Marshall McLuhan, and the medium being the message. It's also the part where, despite what my grandstanding may have led you to believe, I admit that I don't agree with McLuhan. Because it's pretty clear that the medium isn't the message. Though it sounds like a tautology, this might be worth reflecting on for a moment: the medium is the medium. The message, assuming there is one (which is a big enough assumption on its own), is only conveyed through the medium.

Say that out loud. Three times. Think about it. First, understand that art doesn't necessarily have a message and acknowledge that art is a whole lot more than conveying messages, and that the "whole lot more" part is what's at stake in this silly "medium is the message"-talk. Now, move on, and stop pretending that slogans convey deep ideas, or that you can understand deep ideas through slogans.

What McLuhan was saying was this: media shapes the variety of ideas available to you as a consumer in a way that, when one medium becomes dominant, can be artificially limiting. Which is important in a "No shit"-kind of way, but which people often misinterpret to mean, "TV/Jazz/black people/pop music is/are evil." Which is clearly not a consequence of McLuhan's ideas, even if he might have (sort of) wished it had been—minus the racism part, which I just added for flair, and because there are lots of racists out there. The medium is the message if there's only one medium, and if that medium is presided over by a group of omnipotent gatekeepers. Medium is most certainly not the message in anything other than a theoretical blackhole, where people who keep telling you "the medium is the message" imagine it’s actually the case before they go off on their half-baked diatribes—or, when you have anything resembling a choice. Which you always do. Here are a few: CD, MP3, DVD, 180 gram vinyl and, for good measure, the Bonnaroo Music Festival.

All of which is a long way of saying, "Yeah." Yeah, my iPod is broken and I haven't listened to the new Radiohead record in a month because it's only on my iPod and my (previously-complained-about) computer, even though I want to. I'm lazy and I'm prone to pressing play over and over again on the same CD. You can't explain that. In other words, I see your Marshall McLuhen, and I raise you the entirety of aesthetic thought, from Plato to present.

There's an extent to which I'm sympathetic to the argument that declarations about an artwork's ultimate merit are inherently wrongheaded. After all, a pompous ass is a pompous ass, and they're not at all fun to hang out with in social settings. But on the other hand, despite my egalitarian sensibilities, my firm belief that philosophy is not adequately equipped to deal with art, and my conviction that no one has ever given an anywhere-near-justified rubric for his or her own aesthetic theory, I feel like judging art—which we all do on a daily basis—is so goddamn natural that there must exist a Platonic "Form of wonderful art" to which everything aspires. Everything. I repeat. Because everything is in some way artful, and everything is beautiful and tragic, even when it's the opposite.

And so maybe this is my god—art. And maybe my god is an idol. And maybe that's all we can ask from art: to mystify us, help us understand, allow us to heal, permit us to believe in something when we would otherwise believe in nothing. Perhaps we don't have to worry about how exactly it works, because it just does, and because a placebo this great doesn't deserve something as coarse and blunt as an explanation—especially when the explanations never do it justice. If there's to be mystery in the world, let us simply interpret it through our particular rose-colored glasses, soak in it, eat it all up until we've had our fill. Let's never forget, though, that we're wearing glasses.

So what I can tell you about the new Bon Iver album is this:

I'm listening to the new Bon Iver album for the second time today, and though there will probably come a day when I stop finding things I love in it, that hasn't happened yet.

Think Peter Gabriel mixed with Superwolf. Think mesmerizing harmonies and reverb on cash register clangs. Consider the possibility that that which is unexpected only gives you more room to improvise. And consider the possibility that you aren't going to die tomorrow, or that if you are, that it's not the end of the world.

And what I can tell you about CDs versus a broken iPod is this:

If you turn the volume up loud enough on your stereo, you physically tremble. If you turn the volume up too loud when you're listening to your iPod through headphones, you just end up going deaf.

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