Music and memory in a post-iPod world

When I lost my third-generation iPod Nano a couple of years ago, I didn’t know where, when, or how it happened. That’s usually the way all things reveal themselves to my seemingly deteriorating mind lately — in a state of confusion, shock and general inability to ascertain what the hell just happened. I’m not sure if my memory has been weakened mostly by its increasing reliance on technology or by the natural process of aging. But losing my old iPod was like losing a huge chunk of my memory, the one devoted to music and the ways in which I enjoy it. I found this out as soon as I started rebuilding my playlists on my phone and realized that I couldn’t remember all the songs and the track sequencing, even for the ones I’d been listening to for eight years.

So when I recently found my iPod buried deep in a pile of old office forms (don’t ask me how it got there or why it took two years to finally do some spring cleaning), it was like unearthing a lost parcel of my soul. There were playlists with songs I couldn’t remember putting there. There were playlists that I had completely forgotten existed. It was like traveling back in time to meet the old me.

For instance: It turns out that, five years ago, I had Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You in my original alt-country playlist, a choice that never occurred to present-day me. Mazzy Star is technically not alt-country, but Fade Into You, with its pedal-steel-guitar-like swoons, certainly fits the genre, a fact that’s apparently lost to me now. I couldn’t believe it, especially since it’s been one of my favorite songs since high school. Has the part of my soul that’s been perpetually humming Fade Into You finally died? Who did this to me?

Old Feelings

To sift through forgotten playlists is to revisit old feelings. Apparently, there was a period in my life when I was so depressed that I placed Red House Painters’ Void right after What Happens When The Heart Just Stops by Glen Hansard. I was also brought back to a time when I was so happy, I made a playlist featuring Allo Darlin’s Some People Say and (post-Natalie Merchant) 10,000 Maniacs’ rendition of Roxy Music’s More Than This. I’ve underestimated just how much I can change in a few years. Because when I now hear Mary Ramsey sing “You know there’s nothing… more than this,” her words no longer carry the same meaning.

I’ve always felt that music and memory are symbiotic. Apart from the former’s ability to evoke the latter, the two register in the brain the same way — in flashes, in soaring bursts of yearning. If music is the perfect metaphor for memory, then my ancient four-gigabyte iPod proves to be a more accurate representation of my mental storage than the near-boundless ocean of music streaming, which is where I have moved on, thinking I’d lost my obsolete MP3 player forever.

Today’s Music

Spotify has been my main source of music for the past couple of years now and I still can’t say that I’m fully comfortable with it even though its benefits are obvious and life-changing. My ability to discover new music has been accelerated by its “Discover Weekly” feature, a weekly-updated playlist of recommended tracks based on my preferences. Every week, it introduces me to around three to five interesting artists I previously haven’t heard of, artists whose discographies I proceed to raid on Spotify. On top of this, I’m also keeping my New Year’s resolution of visiting music blogs more often to scour the Internet for less-talked-about new releases.

And it’s been a struggle so far. The experience has been akin to joining a full marathon with a 10K-run stamina. More and more new songs pile up on my Spotify account than I have time to listen to, so much so that I keep getting surprised at the sight of a new album I’ve forgotten I’d downloaded weeks prior. The world of songs around me has grown as my capacity to remember them has shrunk. My outdated mind is stuck at 4GB.

The fact that I am now aware of more new music on a weekly basis than in any point of my life is certainly not something to complain about. But I’m not sure I’m “enjoying” the music the same way I always used to. I’m from the cassette and CD generation, when scarcity, along with the singular devotion this made possible, formed me into the kind of music fan I still am now. I could only afford a few albums per month then (and sometimes even just one for an entire quarter) and those albums would stand out in the pre-Internet void and become their own religion. Like Cocteau Twins’ “Four-Calendar Café” in the holiday season of ’93, or Tori Amos’ “Under the Pink” in the summer of ’94, or The Sundays’ “Reading, Writing and Arithmetic” in the first quarter of ’95, albums felt somewhat more magical back when time was less cluttered. You went through entire seasons with these albums’ songs and got to know them well in an extended courtship. You played them over and over until they dissolved into who you are.

On Technology

In its advent, the iPod was a little overwhelming, too, but it offered an easier transition. There was still comfort in being capped at four gigabytes, a limited space that seemed ideal for my very limited bandwidth. I frankly do not know how young people do it — keeping infinite tabs on various developments in music, knowing and hearing and having opinions about seemingly every release that’s out there. I probably can, but not while maintaining a job and a normal life. Spotify has changed my listening habits so much that even playlists have become passé in my life — I stopped making them months ago, as keeping up with my weekly discoveries has taken up most of my music-related time. I know so much now and I’m not exactly sure how to enjoy this vast knowledge.

When it’s Spotify’s time to be obsolete and be subject to nostalgia, I wonder what this will tell me about my old self. Because right now it’s resembling Facebook the way my old iPod resembles a photo album. Its contents seem to me like sonic equivalents of mundane events, fuzzy and uneventful, like workday lunches and OOTDs of some random day, and I keep thinking that the memories that truly matter may be found in a handful of yellowed pages and a few gigabytes. But technology is a lot like the life it mediates: You cannot truly appreciate it until it is lost, forgotten, and examined in hindsight.

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