| Wednesday, June 11, 2003 |
16:15 - I'm such a philistine
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Apple's Music Store continues to flesh itself out, with new notable stuff appearing every Tuesday. There have definitely been a non-trivial number of annoyances about the service-- one of the foremost being that it lists albums by their CD release date, not by their original album release, so you get stuff like every Elvis album being listed as released between 1995 and 2001. I know he's still strumming away in some secluded retreat somewhere, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a recording studio there.
The other thing is that the selection just doesn't seem exactly... tailored to my tastes, I suppose. It's a tall order, asking any store to tailor to my tastes, since I don't buy music on the basis of genre or mood, but rather on the basis of whether I know the song. Hence my music library being filled with everything from the Space Ghost/Brak/Zorak CDs to Disney soundtracks to Mozart concertos to PowerPuff Girls music to David Arkenstone to Springsteen. The bulk of my music buying throughout the 90s was film scores; while some people got all squealy over Tori Amos or The Clash, I was clawing together John Barry and Basil Pouledoris and John Williams and Hans Zimmer soundtracks, not because I'd ever seen the movies, but because these guys were my rock stars. (A testament to this is one of the earliest websites I ever wrote, back in 1995, which I still keep around just to embarrass myself.)
The iTunes Music Store has a whole "Soundtracks" section. And what does it have? Little Nicky.
Oh, sure, there are hundreds of other albums in there too. But even now, it seems that the majority of them are scores that seem carefully designed not to be anything I want, or anything that matches the CDs I already own (so I can get new digital copies of the CDs that are rapidly deteriorating). No Jurassic Park. No Rescuers Down Under. Star Trek scores? Please. Not even for the love of cheesy recycled bitter Leonard Rosenman scores does the database offer up its cooperative hands to me.
It's gradually getting better, though, as I say. Every week there's something new that I'd looked for before, like late-80s REM or those albums from Jackson Browne or Jimmy Buffett that make me realize that I never knew more than the requisite two songs from any of them that KFOX uses on its Two-For-Tuesday lineups. (Some of these bands get frozen out of Triple-Shot-Weekends for lack of three airable hits.) And as fast as I'm able to earmark a couple of discretionary twenties, the database sidles up to me with new dainties with which to tempt me in the dark, furtive alleyway of the Buy Song button.
Lileks, as is so spookily often his wont, managed to put into words a vague feeling I'd been having lately: that I'd become a curmudgeon before my time. That I was denying myself the fruits of youth by not buying the He Got Game soundtrack and instead holding out for something with a hint of the symphonic. But then, this isn't a new feeling for me; ever since my teens I'd had the sense that I was acting like a crotchety old man in all my tastes and dealings, and with each passing day I've been "growing down" and losing-- well, if not age, at least maturity. Or something like that. I know I've loosened up dramatically in recent years, but at the same time I've become sharply more conservative in political thinking, more so every day I spend grousing here on this blog. How do those correlate? I can't help but think that maybe conservatives are plenty capable of having fun, all preconceptions to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, I'm certainly finding it a lot easier to do so now than back in high school when I was a Deeply Concerned Upstanding Youth deciding whether I should send money to Zero Population Growth or Negative Population Growth. Let's see now: How misanthropic do I feel today?
But with that comes a willingness to cross Lileks' "line", to admit that it's there and to clamp a foot down on it to keep it from moving. Whether it applies to smutty billboards or sax and violins on TV or moral relativism, I'm finding that the world does indeed stop rushing around my head quite so paralyzingly once I've committed to a set of boundaries. I'm a lot less likely to dismiss some whole genre of thought-- musical, moral, or political-- as a lost cause or unworthy of exploration. Things seem easier to tackle this way. When you leave yourself open to all possibilities, you risk leaving yourself with no possibilities; it's paradoxical, but I think that by defining a few fence-lines across the cognitive landscape, we create not just dividing lines but congregation points.
To distress the metaphor just a little further: it's been said here and there that the closer together humans live, the less "neighborly" they become. To wit, in densely packed urban dwelling environments, nobody knows their next-door neighbors. They're distrustful of each other, and competitive, and harbor long seething grudges at each other's habits with garbage day or mail pickup or cooking fumes. When they meet in the elevator in the morning, they avert their eyes, wondering whether they heard each other having sex the night before. Whereas in the burbs or the rural areas, neighbors meet at the back fence-- they chat for hours. They become friends. Their homes are sanctuaries, and the meeting grounds are thus all the more comfortable. I'm finding that out all the time with the new house; the cul-de-sac lends itself to conversation, and all the neighbors frequently come out to the asphalt to converse, usually until the usable painting daylight is long gone. Certainly, it's partly a function of the individual people. But there's something about the shape of the interface that invites dialogue just as it divides property.
Does any of this follow from any of the rest of it? I dunno. I've been scatterbrained at best for a good two days now, and I'm only just now bubbling up from having severely gutted and rewritten my old 1995-era guest-book code to be database-driven and moderatable. I'm in post-codal bliss.
Okay, on that note I'd better just back away slowly now.
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