Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, January 08, 2005 The Pitch: It's like The Four Stars meets The Five Anxieties! Rather than write the rather sizable essay sure to emerge about owning an Ipod (pending more research to see if there's anything even remotely new to say about such a played-out topic), I thought I'd write a bit about the rating system on the Ipod.Unknown to me until a few days ago, the Ipod has a rating feature that allows you, with a few pushes of the big white button and a spin of the thumb, to rate the songs on your Ipod from one to five. Then, with Itunes, you can create quick playlists based on the ratings. I find this pretty irresistible, and have just inched over the 10% mark of rating my songs (I've ranked 550 out of the 4781 tunes currently on the damn thing), but weirdly it's been a source of considerable subliminal anxiety. For example, although these ratings are for my own use only, I have given no song more than four stars. This is my first point of anxiety: even though I'm ranking the music for my own appreciation only, I find myself resisting the pull of the five star rank. A five star ranking is for a classic song, I guess, but classic for whom? Subscribing to the suspect conception of the true and beautiful being universal, I'd like to believe that a five star song is one I can play for almost anyone and they'd enjoy it, or, since this list is only for me, a song I could play at any time and I'd always enjoy it. Maybe because I find this definition a little eyebrow raising, I've avoided the five star rating altogether. I imagine, by the way, I'm going about this the way other people do: I have the Ipod shuffle the songs and then rate each song as it comes, rather than listening to, say, all the songs on an album or by an artist and rating the songs in turn. While I can see how some Ipod listeners might have an album of nothing but five star hits (someone who's filled their collection strictly with their favorite songs grabbbed through Kazaa or some other p2p network, or with Audiogalaxy or Napster back in the day), most people's collections would comprise largely of albums and few albums, I think, are nothing but a collection of five star favorites. Most albums have a balance to them: a few standout favorites, several well-liked tunes, some dross, a few clunkers. (And one of the great things about listening to an album repeatedly is how that curve changes, like waves: a new album starts out with such a balance, then grows on repeated listenings to having all the songs become favorites, then recedes to the original curve, but this time with different stand-out favorites and well-liked tunes.) So, let's say an album has fifteen tunes on it: that might be three favorites, six well-liked tunes, four drossy forgettable tunes, and two tracks you just can't stand. Applying this fast and sloppy math, let's say 20% of the songs from all your albums will be your standout favorites. For me, ranking 500 songs already (more sloppy math--I'm rounding down) means I should have 100 songs that are my favorites: four star songs at least, if not five stars. And yet, if I had to guess (and I do since I haven't synched up with Itunes to see the results of my work), I think I've picked maybe 30 tunes out of 500 as four star songs. So, does most of my music suck? Or do I suck? I've wiped out the five star rating for a defintion I might not actually believe in, and now the four star rating is barely applied. There are, as always, a couple of qualifications here: I downloaded a lot of albums from Emusic, often without hearing them. When Emusic offered unlimited downloads, it was easier to download an album, listen to it and then delete it, than to listen to the samplers, and put it on my list of possible downloads. But, of course, me being me, I frequently would download the music and then not get around to listening to it. If I did this with a high enough number of albums and if the Ipod's shuffle function is truly random, then there's a chance that the random selection will be frontloaded with songs I consider dross. And if you assume I'll generally like a song I consider dross by an artist I'm familiar with more than a dross song by an artist I don't, those odds go up. But there's the anxiety. Either my music sucks or I suck. Maybe I'm a fickle music fan, or I have bad taste and I can only tell it now that I'm listening to each song freed from the context of the album, the CD, and the resulting nagging need to like an album (because I just spent money on it). Another anxiety? In order to listen to and rank all the songs, I'm not listening to each song in its entirety, frequently assigning a ranking in the first six of seven seconds and then moving on. After all, 4700+ songs is something like 52 continuous days of listening. That's a tall order, the idea of which fills me with nausea and so I'm doing what a pal of mine did when he assigned music to reviewers for a large music zine--I'm skimming, skimming, skimming. But whereas the albums he assigned then got more complete listens before they got reviewed, some potentially great songs are surely being underranked. If I think a song has potential in the first six seconds, I'll scroll through the song to the one and two minute songs to see if the song is blossomed, seems even more interesting: it's amazing how much music, in this slapdash way, sounds all the same--not that each song sounds like every other song, but that each second of the song sounds so much like every other second. Where's the growth, where's the movement? Again, anxiety. What would I give some of my favorite Brian Eno songs if I was first encountering them this way? Ambient? Techno? Rap? And in fact, most of those I've come across so far have rarely cracked three stars unless I'm really familiar with the tune already. Am I not just robbing certain songs of the full opportunity to make their case, but also discriminating against entire genres in my approach? Speaking of discrimination, here's a nice set of conjoined anxieties: I feel bad when I give women artists two stars or less (similarly, anything less than three stars for an African-American artist). And then, of course, I feel anxious if I give songs by either three stars or more, because I worry I'm doing so not because of the song's merits but just to avoid the anxiety of confronting my own biases. Related to this is my awareness that, Joanna Newsom aside, most of my four star songs have been by white males, and the resulting anxieties there. The first anxiety being, of course, the white male factor, and the second, related to Ms. Newsom, that I'm ranking her songs higher because I'm just now discovering her work and am ga-ga about her album, Milk-Eyed Mender. Where is the test of time? Yet, conversely, there are many other songs I pick as four stars I picked sheerly out of sentimental familiarity. Is Beck's "Beercan" really four stars? Or does it just rank higher than, say, a lot of songs off of Paul Westerberg's Folker because I remember shaking my butt to it and laughing with my friends to it when I was young(er)? Finally, the last anxious consideration: with all these anxieties, why bother? I'm sure there's some fine psychological term for an activity that is pursued to relieve the anxiety the pursuit of such an activity causes. (For some reason, the term "graduate school" comes to mind.) I'm sure some of these anxieties are caused or exacerbated because I do, as a hobby, review comics and movies on the web and try to do so responsibly--some of that is sure to bleed into the world of "personal" reviewing. A lot of this anxiety goes away when I remind myself that I can always adjust a song up or down when I encounter it later, and that these ratings are just for me, not to be seen, not to be shared. But I kind of marvel at the vast number of deranged clowns that have popped out of such an charming little car. I wonder if this has happened to others. posted by Jeff Lester | 7:18 PM | |
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