music hardware, from Victrolas to subcutaneous implants.

[photo via]

An open letter to my iPod-toting children

Kids,

Dad here. For some reason I felt compelled to write about music hardware this morning.

Once upon a time, music and news came from cathedral radios in the parlor. Families (who were long used to sitting around Victrolas and spinets) would gather together to hear word from the western front, or to hear Caruso sing.

High-fidelity record players, and eventually stereos, were considered furniture. Like the huge wooden audio cabinet unit your grandfather built and stained in the late 1960s. The turntable was the centerpiece, and he placed two huge speakers into the console, hidden behind a '60s moorish-latticework-and-scrim that evoked a confessional booth. You could kind of see the speakers, but it was a always shrouded in holy mystery to your uncle and me.

We would all turn off the television and gather as a family to pull vinyl LPs from their liners. Sunday nights we'd lay around the study and we'd pass around album covers and there I began my love for design and typography, photography, color, columns, margins, and ink-on-paper. Looking back, it seemed like a communal, semi-formal event when we listened to records and snacked on hot popcorn and apple wedges. Worshipful in its own way.

At one point Mark and I were handed a box full of my mom's 45s  from her personal collection, which we played endlessly. My favorite single was the Fendermen's 1960 cover of the Jimmie Rodgers classic Mule Skinner Blues and backed with a Ventures-era guitar instrumental called Torture.  [Kids: 45s — named after the revolutions-per-minute at which they spun on the turntable — were vinyl singles, containing a song earmarked for radio play on Side A, with a more obscure "B Side" on the back.

About the time I was trusted to operate the delicate turntable arm without fear of blunting a needle, mom and dad opted for a new system that had a cassette player, AM/FM radio, 8-track player and turntable all in one sleek, aluminum and smoked plexiglas unit. Welcome to the 1980s. We never really gathered as a family around that new stereo after the first few months. Music became an individual activity. Mark and I grew older and our tastes diverged. I veered off towards new wave techno music and synth pop; Uncle Mark preferred blue collar rock and roll and British pop-rock.

Vinyl was relegated to garage sale fodder; 8-tracks faded into obscurity, and cassettes reigned supreme. Enter the boom box, the ghetto blaster and the Walkman to bring portability to the equation. Dual cassette decks allowed the creation of mixtapes and sharing. For a season, cassingles replaced 45s. We demanded more individuality (and thanks to lighter-weight headphones and earbuds, we got autonomy thrown in). We sought more quality crammed into a smaller footprint. Modular home stereos in the 1990s (like the one I still use) traded the turntable for compact disc changers, a technology which paved the way for CD juke boxes.

Then came iPod and iTunes. Perhaps if you look around the house, you'll still be able to find the first generation iPod — the one Jordan calls the iBrick — and if you charge it, I bet it'll still sync up. Smaller iPods and iPhones and their charging cables began to clutter our lives. As I look around right this second, I can see three charging bases, two sets of earbuds over there, and one 1/8" to 1/8" audio cable. In the flight to untether ourselves, we're choking on our cables. All so we can go off by ourselves and listen to our own playlists.

I know the day is coming when the outmoded idea of carrying around one's music (and its requisite hardware) will seem antediluvian. Music — specific music, probably with the ability to arrange, remix and maship on the fly — will just be able to be … summoned. Presto. It's there, shimmering in our ear canals without pesky hardware. Good vibrations.

I want to go on record and predict that communal, shared music will make a huge comeback in the next few years. Not "shared" in the sense of swapping MP3 singles across peer-to-peer networks, but "shared" in ways similar to the times we play roadtrip CDs for the minivan. Maybe even a return to living room lazy Sundays. Maybe music will stop being so generationally silo-partitioned, and we'll arrive at a fix to our lingering 20th century notions of hyper-individualistic music.

love, Dadsoup

Comments

[axegrinder]

My two roommates and I have a fun practice we pull out at least once a week. We'll start by gathering in the living room with our laptops to surf the net. Then, we take turns playing one song each from our iTunes while reading/surfing. It's actually a lot of fun groaning or cheering each other's choices.

[salguod]

Mom and Dad still use their tube Fisher stereo (FM only, natch'). It's the size of a sofa, with the requisite record storage behind the sliding tambor (sp?) doors and the record changer on the sliding drawer. Cost them some $650 in 1965. They've since added a new single record Hitachi turntable (like 20 years ago and they kept the changer to play 78's), a 3M Wollensak cassette deck (has to be 35 years old, complete with swinging record level meters) and a Pioneer magazine CD changer. Can't plug the changer and the tape deck in at the same time - not enough inputs.

Ironically, with all that (one time) state of the art equipment, we didn't spend much time gathered around the stereo, listening to music. Dad's taste is pretty one dimensional - barbershop quartets - so, there wasn't a ton of common ground there.