In 2008, Carrie Brownstein wrote a blog post for her NPR blog Monitor Mix expressing her hostility for her iPod’s shuffle feature:
For one, most of us don’t like the notion of random, even when the choices presented to us are culled from our own collections. It’s like if there were a robot randomly selecting what we wear each day. Sure, it’s our own closet and our own clothing, but we don’t want to wear sweaters on 80-degree days, or to put on some magenta silk top that only looked good in the dressing room. With music, it boils down to mood and context, as well. You can adjust the randomness of the shuffle feature, but the options lack nuance. There need to be choices like, “Only play this song if I am driving between Seattle and Portland and I think about my old friend from high school” or, “Please play this one on cold winter days when the sky looks like it might snow and I realize I’m out of ingredients to make hot chocolate.”
Additionally, by placing the songs in a horrible sequence, the iPod shuffle highlights the weaknesses of one’s music collection instead of the strengths. After a few bad songs in a row, I begin to second-guess my taste in music. Why, for instance, do I still have that one Ludacris song on there — or entire albums by Mastodon, Journey, or The Magic Numbers when all I need is a handful of songs? Also, there seems to be too much Beatles and Roxy Music and not nearly enough Wilco or Springsteen. And why play only my least favorite songs by my favorite bands?
As she acknowledges in the next paragraph, some of that is her fault, putting or leaving songs on her iPod that she’s tired of, or ones that require very specialized contexts to get. Me – I love it as it takes songs out of their familiar contexts and isolates them for a moment before juxtaposing them with something unlikely. With this beautiful weather, I rode my bike to work today and had two James Brown tracks – “The Big Payback, Pt. 1” and “Damn Right, I Am Somebody, Pt. 1” from the recent The Singles Vol. 9: 1973-1975 – and Neu!’s “Paradise Walk” from Neu! ’86 surprise me. Heard next to the groundbreaking funk that preceded this period, the band has always sounded mechanical to me and Brown, unengaged. Today, the band sounded like a machine and Brown knew enough to get out of the way and let it do its thing. The grooves don’t breathe like “Sex Machine” or “There Was a Time,” but these tracks are so tight that almost sound like they themselves were built from samples.
As for the Neu! track, last week I wrote about my disappointment that I couldn’t come up with a defense of Neu! ’86 that I could believe in, but hearing “Paradise Walk” separated from the numerous re-examinations/reiterations of the “Crazy” melody, it jumped out as a sort of dub-based rock. The album’s still not up to standard set by the previous Neu! albums, but I now want to start checking out other tracks on their own to see what else was overshadowed by overall voice of the album.
