bigideas

Many of you now know I’m a music geek, to the extent that my iPod is one of my favourite inorganic things. But I’ve had a vague sense that something was wrong ever since I embraced the MP3 medium some years ago. I think iTunes, of all things, finally showed me why.

I should say that as a point of principle I can’t stand iTunes. It secretly makes decisions for you. It connects to the internet without asking (or tries to, anyway). By default, it owns your CD/DVD drive, whether you ask it to or not. It doesn’t save your tags or cover art to the MP3 files, meaning you have to re-tag repeatedly. Fundamentally, I don’t trust it to do anything other that move my MP3s from my disk drive onto my iPod. But it has one thing. It has CoverFlow. And CoverFlow has something slightly magical about it.

Let’s be clear here: CoverFlow is a bone-simple idea. With each album in your MP3 collection you associate a cover, by downloading it from iTunes (if iTunes doesn’t have it, tough luck; but you should use a free product like MP3Tag for this stuff anyway). CoverFlow just gives you a view of those album covers and lets you “flick through” them, a bit like flicking through real CDs or even — ooh — the old vinyl you’ve stuck in the loft:

When I originally saw this feature a while ago I thought it was a cute gimmick. I saw it as a nifty bit of software some enterprising nerd had built over a lunch hour just for the sake of getting the maths right on those transformations as the covers zip past. But I’ve suddenly become addicted to it. Why is it so seductive?

I would have thought that was obvious, at least for someone of my age. In my formative years a “record collection” was still something that sat on shelves, something you have in alphabetical order and occasionally just look at admiringly. Buying a record (that’s what we used to call them) isn’t just about acquiring the ability to hear the music it contains. And whatever certain people say, it isn’t really about the cover art or the packaging either, which are often dull or even downright ugly. It’s about having a thing. The LP or CD is a physical artefact, and there’s something important about that because it makes the music real.

At the end of the posthumously-released concert album Last Date, Eric Dolphy is heard to remark, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air, you can never catch it again”. Music is inherently intangible; it’s physical but not an object. Congealing it onto mica or vinyl is reassuring because it seems then that you can catch it again, as I just did with Dolphy’s album. You have power over it. You can play it over and over, start and stop where you like, extract one track and recontextualise it in a playlist (or what we used to call a “mix tape”). And of course, having your music in MP3 form gives you more of that power, not less. Now you can scrobble it at Last FM and that sort of thing as well as, of course, walk around with thousands of hours of it in your pocket, enabling you to command it not only from your Hi-Fi at home but at the bus stop, in the office, on the treadmill or wherever.

So it isn’t that we’ve lost power over the music — quite the contrary. Rather we’ve sacrificed the sense of tangibility we got as part of the package. When I buy an MP3 album and download it, I have this curious feeling that I haven’t really got anything. This is an illusion. The CD isn’t the music; the music is encoded on the CD, and is data exactly as the MP3 is data. The same is true of a vinyl LP, only in that case, if you look very closely, you can see how the data’s encoded in the groove.

So I think this is really about a sentimental attachment to an album as an entity. Not the music, but the album, the “record”. We want it to have its own identity, not to be just a certain collection of files in a folder among many other such files.

The folder-file structure is a simulation of something you find in an office, and it feels wrong. It’s uniform and administrative. CoverFlow, on the other hand, is a simulation of a record collection, and presents you with a riot of jarring colours and dissonant design values. The idea that it makes your MP3s more “aesthetically appealing” is a bit odd — “semiotically appealing” might be better.

Anyway, the concreteness of the real album was already a kind of fraud. Yes, it’s a material object, but it’s not the material object we’re interested in. The jewel box, inserts and CD themselves are usually worthless. This, I think, is why CoverFlow works. It’s actually very like my physical CD collection. That’s not because it has many of its properties but because it fulfills the same function.

Now when I look at the shelves of CDs that have been relegated to a spare room, I see them as a visualisation of the music. They’ve become a kind of surrogate CoverFlow. I’m not dealing with a software visualisation of a set of phsyical objects; I’m in hyperreality, a place where meaning is the local currency, not fact. And I realise it’s always been like that, and that moving over to MP3 hasn’t really changed anything.

The photo of the vinyl collection is courtesy of jemstone.