I’m Not Here To Cause No Trouble, I’m Just Here To Do The iPod Shuffle

by John McFerrin

My name is John McFerrin, and I’m a shuffle-holic.

As somebody whose music collection so heavily orients around albums, as well as somebody who maintains a website that evaluates artists based on the quality of their albums and who contributes to a podcast centered around deep dives into specific albums, there’s a case to be made that shuffle, as a concept, sits at loggerheads with how I should ideally engage with the music I tend to consume. While many albums in my collection are such that the specific ordering of tracks within them isn’t especially critical to how favorably I rate them, many other albums in my collection are ones where sequencing absolutely matters. In these albums, where the choices of album openers, side openers, album closers, side closers, track twos, and other track placements are so very critical in optimizing the experience one can have with the album, ripping these tracks out of their context may seem to undermine the primary reason these tracks were included in the first place. This situation becomes even more acute in the context of classical, where contrast between movements is often just as important as contrast within movements, and the idea of listening to a second movement adagio or third movement scherzo ripped from context is one that has horrified friends of mine more than once over the years.

In a sense I agree with all of this, and yet putting my whole collection on shuffle and seeing what happens (and jotting down the results) has been a staple of my music listening habits for well over a decade. Much of my music listening, of course, centers around the albums I plan to review in a given month, and I also make room for listening related to Discord & Rhyme and for my own entertainment (along with listening to audio lectures and various podcasts), but without a doubt, my favorite music listening experiences come on those days at the beginning or end of a given work week when I leave my iPod on shuffle during the work day. A reasonable question, then, is why I find such joy in these experiences.

In giving the question some serious thought, I find that my enjoyment of shuffle boils down to a handful of primary points. The first reason is that, every so often, the shuffle algorithm will produce a pairing of tracks so drastically different from each other in every way that I can’t help but laugh. For me, the all-time winner in this category comes from a time when the track “Phantom Lord” from Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All debut was followed immediately by a middle movement from one of Beethoven’s cheerier op.18 string quartets, but there are scores of other examples through the years that have brought me a smirk and a chuckle in the moment.

A second reason for my fondness for shuffle is that, historically, it’s been an effective way to ease me into artists where I might not have otherwise had time or patience to give them the chance they deserved. XTC remains the pinnacle example of this for me; for years, the only ones of their albums I ever felt like listening to in full were Skylarking and Black Sea, but hearing other albums of theirs (especially English Settlement and The Big Express) in piecemeal through shuffle allowed me to get enough of a grip on them for me to come to like them in their proper form.

Just as shuffle has provided me with openings into artists I might not have appreciated as easily when I was first getting acquainted with them, shuffle has also helped ensure that I’m never really done with a given artist or album like might otherwise happen. As I have grown older and my life has grown busier, a fact once inconceivable about my life has become impossible to ignore: no matter how much I like a given artist or album, the number of times that I will listen to them in my lifetime is ultimately finite, and it’s very likely that there are many albums in my collection that I enjoy and that I’ve also already listened to in full for the last time in my life. As D&R’s Dan Watkins once observed in our Slack channel, constantly becoming familiar with music you haven’t heard before inevitably means that, after a certain period of time, you essentially reach closure with any piece of music, putting it on the shelf to make room for another new piece of music. With shuffle, though, I’m never completely done with a given piece of music, and while I may go years without deliberately putting on an album or track that I once enjoyed, the shuffle algorithm has an uncanny ability to reacquaint me with old friends that I didn’t know I needed right up until the moment I heard them again.

A fourth reason that I enjoy shuffle so much is that it protects me from my own natural tendency to gravitate towards only a small handful of tracks or albums from a given artist. Left to my own devices, it’s likely that the only Debussy I would listen to would be “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and maybe “La Mer”; with Stravinsky, it would be his three most famous ballets (“Petrushka,” “The Firebird,” “The Rite of Spring”) and his violin concerto; with Procol Harum, it would just be the debut and Exotic Birds and Fruit. In every case, though, their total work deserves better than just listening to a narrow sliver, and thus shuffle ensures that, every so often, I’ll listen to something from Debussy’s “Ariettes Oubliees,” or from Stravinsky’s “Cat’s Cradle Songs,” or something from A Salty Dog or from Grand Hotel. Shuffle is no respecter of reputation, and it ensures that I will take advantage of the full scope of my collection in some form.

Finally, the fifth main reason is that, in listening to rock, pop, classical, jazz, funk/soul, blues, and other genres all mixed up together on a routine basis, I can’t help but ultimately notice that, despite differences in presentation and in information density between different pieces, music is ultimately music. The same intensity that fuels Bartok’s string quartets is the same intensity that fuels Iron Maiden or fusion-era Miles Davis, and the same lyrical beauty that fuels the middle movements of one of Mozart’s piano concerti is the same lyrical beauty that fuels Joni Mitchell or The Beach Boys at their best. The goals and means may change through time, but whether the goal is an expression of praise towards the divine or of one’s individuality, or whether the means is an 18th century harpsichord or a 20th century Hammond organ, music is always about finding a way to communicate that which words alone cannot. Shuffle can facilitate an understanding of music as a whole in a way that individual pieces, no matter how great, typically fail to achieve, and I look forward to the (hopefully) hundreds of more times I will be able to partake of this understanding in the remainder of my life.