Shuffle As Medium

By Robbie on January 12, 2009

I have a midwestern musicophile friend, Steve, who is not a musician but (maybe "but" is misplaced, for various reasons) is very serious about music. Riding in his car in Kansas City last year, I was rifling through a stack of new-ish factory CDs, most of them by musicians who get some kind of attention from the world of Spin and Pitchfork and No Depression and so on, and many of whom I didn't know. "Still committed to the CD?" I asked/razzed him. I'm getting in the habit of razzing him on that. Most of my music, as measured not in minutes but individual purchases, is bought in MP3 singles, and, given the steady shrinkage of brick-and-mortar music outlets and the marvelous ease of itunes and ipods, I'm always a little surprised to meet music lovers whose consumption methods haven't changed in the last 15 years.

But Steve thinks the album format in particular represents a work of art, endowed (at least by the thoughtful artists he appreciates) with a structure and arc, a beginning and middle and end, a framer's intent. "I am obstinate in thinking that these songs are laid out in the way that Josh Ritter intended me to hear them," he says. That attitude carries a generous kind of noblesse oblige, from consumer to author, that I, speaking as a self-interested member of the latter class, find hard to assail. But frankly, isn't it just as likely that Josh's label -- or more benignly his bandmates, or his wife -- had their paws on the running order as that an act of pure, creative willpower is encoded in it? Aren't a lot of the collections we put together more like "Hey Jude" than "Sgt. Pepper"? Maybe we strive to lead off with a strong one and bury the weakest one or two in the last third; usually we see to it that like keys, tempos, and grooves are kept apart. But with most of our work -- those of us who work in the coin of the "song" -- there's not a divinely mandated layout that the customer breaches at his peril. There are any number of albums whose components you could toss in the air, and no damage done.

Let me now speak as a consumer, acknowledging the self-evident: being able to put ten thousand songs in a device and hit "shuffle" is a wondrous gift. Am I really up for a prolonged dive into some weirdo's head every time I play music? Since the 1960s, we have seen what happens when we call singers "artists" and suggest that a normal production schedule consists of their releasing a conceptually unified twelve-song cycle every year or two. It may suit the profit-hungry business and the attention-hungry singer, but it sure makes a lot of work for the buyer, a lot of wading-through and wandering-away-from and forgetting and discarding. And for those of us that try, like my friend, to be scrupulous and humble in our approach to what is potentially Art, it puts us at the butt end of a lot of hourlong one-sided conversations.

Conversationalists aren't, as a rule, that good; and no matter how multi-capable a musician is, there's no disguising DNA. You can use a solo piano on your first track, a steeldrum band on the next, a klezmer orchestra on the next, but your way of framing a lyric will still ring through. Or, if there aren't words, then some telltale trace of your harmonic predilections, your knowledge, your shortcomings and ignorance and quirks, your regional accent. One track will have the same amplitude range as the next, as most albums have a single masterer. And so on. That's why shuffle is the way to go when you want something more akin to a real conversation, or to change the metaphor, when you'd rather enjoy the buffet than order a giant portion of a single dish.

Treating music this way has the advantage of congruence with reality as we understand it post-Einstein. The banjo music that we grew up with is awfully comforting, but in our hearts we know it isn't truly or magically privileged over Nepalese percussion music. So we buy a few singles, resync our MP3 players, and hit the button. The Nepalese bumps into the Sonny Osborne, shockingly at first, but then, perhaps, we glancingly perceive some strange commonality, some bizarrely echoed cadence that would have remained hidden if not for the instant accessibility of all kinds of music in 2008, and a device that plays "52 Pickup" with them.

What does the shared cadence signify? That's an awfully deep discussion, and I might rather keep my listening on a plane of childlike pleasure, which the ipod shuffle magnificently affords. Shuffling leads me to songs I like and know, but somehow never knew I liked. They were previously stuck fast in a turgid patch of someone's divinely mandated running order, and I have never been able to hear them in a fresh context. Actually, "no context" is more what the ipod grants us. Context is something most of us modern music consumers have way too much of. It's a barrier against pleasure and can even impede an intelligent response. Forget that this is Nepalese, forget that that horn player is a well-respected NYC downtown scenester, forget that this is an expensive commercial record and that is a cheap cool one. What does the music we are listening to really sound like? Wouldn't it be better to know?

I've been hearing a lot of tracks for the last couple days in that previously-heard-but-with-too-much-distorting-context category. They come up on the shuffle, and for the first couple bars, you think: What the hell is that? Then you figure it out, but you still retain a clear memory of those first few bars, and from that you can form some fresh opinions. (Or you don't figure it out, and you listen longer, and finally in defeat you have to look at the screen.) Here are some random impressions from randomly generated music:

An acoustic player I thought I admired unqualifiedly plays too showily and excessively.

The Band (as in "Bob Dylan and") has a signature as strong as Alfred Hitchcock's, inhering much more strongly in the playing styles than the compositions. The rhythm section is instantly unmistakeable, followed closely by the keyboards. There are very few bassist-drummer combinations in rock music that are so stamped personalities as unique and innovative as Rick Danko's and Levon Helm's.

I think Sheryl Crow is a great singer -- who doesn't? -- but, inexplicably, she has released at least one song that sure sounds like a low-budget, home-studio self-release. I mean that in nothing but a bad way.

Here is an unbelievably fatuous remark. My own songs, those I haven't heard recently enough to recognize right away, often sound interesting to me in the moment before recongition. Of course I quickly realize who it is. But -- from the point of view of that first moment, when it might be anyone's record -- I think: hm, this is possibly interesting. Again, for me the playing generates more interest than the writing. Incidentally, this only gives rise to gloomy afterthoughts: if it was all that good-sounding, why wouldn't more people like it?!

Toccatas are scary.

To hear Keith Jarrett go on about it, you might think that picking and tuning and positioning and miking a piano for the purpose of recording was like manipulating photon beams to try to detect particle charges. Yet Wayne Horvitz's piano sounds consistently natural, simple, articulate, lush, and great; I doubt whether it took weeks to achieve and I doubt whether years of work could improve on it.

Of the natural power of music, Roscoe Holcomb noted that when you play a fiddle or a banjo in a room with a 2-year-old in it, the 2-year-old stops and listens. The sound of Clara Ward's voice has that kind of transfixing effect on this 45-year-old.

End of impressions, but one more comment about the shuffle: has anyone else noticed that at times it seems a tad un-random? One key leads to another, a prominent fingerpicked banjo line segues to a trebly banjo-like guitar signature, the same artist hardly ever plays twice in a row. Has Apple developed some insidious algorithm that simulates a random order but doesn't quite deliver it? Is it programmed to separate artist names and to seek, even if irregularly, like-timbred pairs?