“The iPod is the most popular Christmas gift this year, but it comes with a new type of snobbery: what, exactly, do you play on it? Musical snobbery has been around since one Neanderthal struck another on the head with a bone and called it a drum solo. Now there is a new form of musical elitism – iPod snobbery,” Charles Purcell writes for The Age. “First, there’s the vanity that comes with owning that slimline, beautifully designed instrument, with its white headphones a sign for all nearby muggers that a new client is in town. Yet the real snobbery is in the choice of music one imports into the iPod; which songs, to paraphrase Elaine from Seinfeld, are ‘iPod worthy.'”
“Looking at some people’s iPod song list is like examining some yuppie’s bookshelf, full of books about feminism and architecture in the Weimar Republic that you just know the owner has never read, there simply to impress the casual viewer. So it is with the iPod,” Purcell writes. “Perhaps scared of admitting that they like Mandy Moore, snobs pack their iPods with music from impenetrable weirdos such as Belle & Sebastian, Sigur Ros, Mum and Bjork. It doesn’t matter that the songs are by a collective of 20-something lesbians from Kent singing about how they ritualistically severed the manhood of a university lecturer who gave them a C.”
Purcell writes, “What matters is that the selection doesn’t attract scorn from fellow iPod snobs. Otherwise, they might be forced to kill to retain their credibility, like Christian Bale explaining his love of Huey Lewis before going nuts with an axe in American Psycho… Sometimes entire decades are verboten. There are those who believe the ’80s new romantic movement is yet to be surpassed, but iPod snobs think it was more of a bowel movement. Devo’s Whip It and Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf are not for them or their sacred iPod.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Click to launch Apple’s iTunes directly linked to the iTunes Music Store’s Barry Manilow collection. MDN openly admits to having one or two of Barry’s best work on one or more of our iPods — and we didn’t rename the files to hide them either!