Halfway There

Around the time that I wrote this post, I reached two life milestones that, while mostly unrelated, can’t help but make me think of them in tandem. The first is that I reached the age of 40, a number that has long filled me with some sense of anxiety and dread. The second is that, on my custom-modded iPod Classic, which has a 512 GB SSD hard drive (472 GB available for use), I finally passed the 50% level (236 GB) in filling it with music to listen to.

The story of reaching the halfway point of my iPod is largely the story of my life over the past 25 years, the period of my life in which I’ve been interested enough in music to devote so much of my time and money to it. As a high-schooler, every CD acquired was a jewel, either acquired through judiciously parting with my meager earnings or through the benevolence of a family member, and at the time it seemed like all the music one could ever want or need. In college, I came to realize just how wrong I was, as oceans and continents of potential music discoveries opened before me, and much of the money allocated to me in a given semester, as well as the money I earned to supplement this fixed amount, went towards acquiring as much music as I could (not at the expense of textbooks and food, but definitely at the expense of movies, books, concerts, and other things). In my 20s, I continued to purchase and consume music at a rate that some might consider insane, and my collection continued to grow and grow. In late 2004, my parents got me a 40 GB iPod, and my music listening habits would never be the same: I could now listen to music easily on my commute and at work, without carrying a portable CD player or pre-choosing my CDs for the day, and all the while my requirements for space grew with the space in new iPod models. In my late 20s, my attention diverged solely from the world of rock and pop into the worlds of classical and jazz, and the world opened up even further. All the while, the rush of finding new and amazing works, seemingly tailored just for me and my own peculiar tastes, continued unrestrained, and all the while my collection grew and grew and grew. Many years later, I realized that I was slowly advancing on filling up my 160GB iPod, a threshold that once seemed unthinkable, and both my hunger for new music and my desire to have freedom to choose whatever I wanted from my collection whenever I wanted to hear anything (and in my circumstances, my ability to listen to music generally required me to have mobility not provided by listening on a computer or on a stereo) pushed me to look on eBay for people willing to provide me the iPod that could fulfil my needs into the foreseeable future.

As I have reached the point of filling this iPod halfway, I observe that the sum total of this music has given me tremendous pleasure and joy in my life, yet there’s an inescapable pang of sadness in there. This essentially comes from considering these questions: how the f**k am I going to fill the other half, and do I even want to? For all of the expenses that life requires of me, I’m at a point in my life where, within reason, I can acquire any music that I want to. Furthermore, the once delicate ballet I used to have to consider in regards to balancing space and quality (in which I ultimately found just the right VBR settings in terms of mean quality and bit rate range to get acceptable sound quality in acceptable file sizes) now seems quaint given the loosening of once tight space restrictions; one major consequence of this has been a greater willingness on my part to purchase music digitally, not only from major vendors (mostly Amazon nowadays for various reasons) but also from Discipline Global Mobile (from whom it is possible to vacuum up entire King Crimson-related tour legs at a shockingly low price). Given the relief that this ability to acquire music digitally more freely has also provided in terms of allowing me to have fewer physical CDs (which I still purchase regularly, a habit my brother frequently and rightly mocks me for, but not as often as I once did) and thus less possibility of running out of space to store them, the opportunity is in place for me to keep my collection growing and growing and growing. Which is wonderful.

And yet …

And yet, there is more then a small measure of “So you like donuts, eh? Well, have all the donuts in the world!” at play here. Over the past few years, I’ve inevitably noticed that the highs of getting acquainted with new and different music have lessened in frequency and magnitude. I certainly come across new gems fairly regularly (some courtesy of this podcast, some through other means), but certainly not with the regularity that I did in my 20s and into my early 30s. Some of this is because of a general fatigue that has set in with the burdens of age and parenthood (and thus less of an ability to get as excited about anything as I once could), but much of this is because the continents of potential music discoveries feel both less numerous and less immediately enticing. This is not to say that many of these potential discoveries couldn’t, wouldn’t, or shouldn’t interest me with the smallest bit of effort on my part; sadly, though, it is much harder to carve out space for the new, both in my mind and in my energy, than it was 15 or even 5 years ago. I might be able to slowly gain some superficial familiarity with artists and styles that have been foreign to me previously, but deep familiarity with the new is largely something I have to reserve either for my website or for the podcast.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not continuing to acquire new music, but it does mean that the motivation underpinning it is often much less genuine enthusiasm than a sense of “ehn, may as well.” A good example is a collection I recently bought of the studio albums of the band Chicago (10 CDs worth) through 1978: I don’t know Chicago well, I don’t know how much I’ll like them, and I’ll probably never have the time and energy to get to know them well. Why did I buy it? Because it was $30, and as a friend of mine on Twitter remarked, “with hard drive space getting as cheap as it is, you can’t afford *not* to buy 10 Chicago albums!”

What does this mean for the next 236 GB I put on my iPod? Some of it will be genuine half-assed attempts at becoming familiar with well-known acts and albums, whether it’s because they’re recommended in a prominent list (this will especially be true with jazz albums) or because they’re famous or because somebody I respect recommends them. Much of it, though, will almost certainly fall into the category of “consolidation,” especially as the ever-increasing list of older and retired acts present in my collection realizes that the only way in which they can continue to move new product is through archive releases. Some of this will be through official releases (e.g. Bob Dylan, David Bowie, King Crimson, The Grateful Dead), and some of it will be through unofficial releases involving artists who don’t care to monetize the bootlegs that are easily available (Bob Dylan again, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead). All in all, I will probably find happiness in much of the music I acquire going forward, but it won’t be the same in aggregate as it was in the past.

Of course, all of this ignores the most likely possibility of how the rest of my iPod will be filled: 200+ GB worth of material from Prince’s Vault.