Today I was scrolling through the thousands of songs on my little MP3 player and then playing some of them while admiring the album art. After that, I listened to the built-in FM radio for a while. During all this the thought once again occurred to me it would be easy to take this technology for granted. I think I can honestly say I never do that, but it's probably common for some people to overlook how special this all is.
I'm not talking about the music itself (which is another whole subject) but the way we listen to it. It's always been about getting the sound to our ears, but the gadgets we use to do that have been transformed through the years, and sometimes it's easy to forget how far we've come.
Not counting hearing lullabies as a toddler, I think I first became aware of music when I was a young boy and heard it on the radio. And even though this was an era where radios were a fixture in most homes, they were expensive to buy and maintain, and even a table model was a costly addition to the household. My parents were a struggling young couple who wouldn't have been able to fit something like that into their budget, so the odds are pretty good I first heard music at my grandparents' house.
I remember they had a large console Philco that was taller than me, and it was common practice for everyone to gather around it after supper and listen to music. (That's right - just like the Waltons.) In the Winter, the pot-bellied stove would be glowing red right along with the radio dial as my grand-dad tuned it to the kind of music they liked. Having spent their whole lives in the country, you can probably guess what that was.
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
this reminds me of this country store i went to a few months ago in upstate ny. there were old radios here and there on the shelves.
...all tuned to the same station, which was picking up the satellite radio playing elsewhere at the store.
2 - Big Geez
But was there a pot-bellied stove with an electric log inside? LOL
Thanks for the comment, Mark.
3 - Mark Saleski
even better would be one of those cardboard fake fireplaces with the lightbulb and spinner behind the fake cardboard flames.
oh yea!
4 - Michael J. West
God, Big Geez, I love your articles. Pretty soon I'll be able to get back into some music writing of my own. :-)
5 - zingzing
i don't own an ipod. i don't own a home computer. just in the past couple of weeks i've been adding music to itunes on my computer here at work. basically, i just bring in stuff i've borrowed or mp3 discs that people have made me. i've begun to notice how infrequent it is for me to listen to a full album. kinda sucks. having so much choice kind of allows you to make choices. for once, that is dangerous. [struggling to make it all the way through the band-the band, but really wanting to put on the new current 93...]
6 - Big Geez
Thanks for all the comments, everybody.
Michael, I hope you do - you are missed. (Your "critic's conundrum" article not only reverberated with me, but I also stole the word for a completely unrelated article I wrote later.)