Customer Reviews

iPod, Therefore I Am

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This book must have been a struggle to write because it just does not contain enough interesting information to warrant it being book length. Yes, music is transformative and restorative in so many ways. We use songs as anchors to motivate and inspire us. Our musical memories are associative and connect us to so many events inn our lives. And iPods are great little devices that have become pop culture icons. This is probably the reason this book will sell some copies. I think it could have been a powerfully insightful essay, concise and poignant. As a book, it fluff. Boring, dull, poorly written fluff.

The disease of iPod addiction, as diagnosed by one enjoying his stay in the intensive (audial) care ward, a rock (music) junkie. I read this just after [I also reviewed these on Amazon], Leander Kahney's Cult of IPod and Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84. All three recent books cover the past three decades from a young middle-aged writer's partially autobiographical perspective. They all mix at various levels the blends of pop music with corporate retail with experimental electronics-- as sold often by more of an individual and maverick creator to be treasureed by a self-identified subculture. Jones happens to be from his birthdate only a year off from me, so many of the trends, fashions, and musical trends of course proved familiar. Like Reynolds, he looks back on the past forty years of a life spent with music. Like Kahney, he seeks to uncover the impact of the IPod through a combination of personal experience and journalistic research.

Here, he purports to show how his new ability to compact the soundtrack of his life into a hand-held device, his encounters with the eras of glam, punk, disco, jazz, and a lot of classic and unclassifiable rock can all be plumbed for significance. He concludes that the iPod emerges as the most significant example within his memory of how technology influences content, or the consumption of content. A good thesis, but even in only a couple of hundred smallish pages with generous margins, the concision of this observation does not need such extended personal validation. The threads tying his initiation into the lair of the white box to all of the patterns from the rest of what he includes here as his life look unravelled and frayed.

I agree with Jones' ratings of Sgt Pepper & Exile on Main Street, but not his assessment of Siouxsie & the Banshees' The Scream of "Pere Ubu's 'difficult' second album." I disagree that the 80s per se were best symbolized by the rise of the CD; most people of us (at least outside of London's New Romantic jetset) only were acquiring discs near the end of the decade, the talismanic LP's powers fading gradually, most noticeably only at the decade's close. I agree with his succinct, suitably elegant profile of Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry.

Jones adds his own memories to an overview of how miniaturized electronics shifted from utility of function (power & data) to unity of links (WWW & networks) and now to the pleasure of the "personal computer" (or Mac) hedonist (iPods & PowerBooks. He recalls his pop music journalism for i-D, relates a few of the scenes he saw at clubs, tries to summarize how the 80s designer hedonism engendered today's total selling of products as lifestyle trends, and argues that the 5% of the world hip and tuned in to trends before everyone else in the 70s has also given way to a fusion of marketing niches and massive consumer buy-in to fetishizing consumption.

These points are made sensibly and easily, and Jones often either amuses or confounds by mixing an impressively wide familarity of what he stocks his 40GB iPod with with songs both of a dully familiar hum and totally obscure, record-geek squawk. He recounts the effects the iPod has on his life. He notes the reactions of his friends. Confusingly, he boasts of his enormous record collection, but then seems to imply all of it was uploaded judiciously to his 40GB library with room to spare. How large his presumably vast (given his profession and avocation) musical storehouse in its original storage appears in my estimation far less in bulk and raw potential than I would have predicted.

The chapters on Steve Jobs, the 80s, and some of his musical ruminations about disco and jazz appear as if from other material Jones had prepared aside from his chronicled courtship of his own iPod. I get the sense that this sporadically reappearing rationale for the book-length report would have been better limited to a 5000 word article. What could have been told quite well as a long feature here gets dispersed into a diffused cultural commentary such as Kahney or Reynolds produced-- as mingled with a musical autobiography similar to that (with both protagonists sharing a few lists) fictionalized in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. Or Hornby's own recollections as non-fictional musings in a similar key, Songbook.

All of Jones' pieces are not joined. For example, how or if he manages to convert his uploaded audio files from the good AAC to the great AIFF format is left unclear as he recounts that episode. His book ends with an admission that the magical white box has worsened his collecting affliction. The magical device combined with the power of the Net that can retrieve ever more scarce songs compounds his acquisition addiction. Other chapters cover seduction and the right tune; the evolution of MP3s; glam and punk as Jones bought into them; the links between Macs, Apple, and PCs; how the "portable open database" that would be the POD with the "I" of the Internet inspired Jonathan Ive's design; and ITunes delivery. All these parts have potential as self-contained essays, but their cohesion into this assemblage of fifteen chapters needs further elucidation.

Jones leaves his demonstration of the iPod and its impacts on society incomplete. That and a bit on how the iPod can help speed seduction are the contents. This ultimately brief book feels much longer, and not all for the good of the reader in its meandering contents. A working draft & promising thesis, but this version needed lots more revision before it should have been published. P.S. For an editor, Jones should have checked that the RCA MP3 player is not called "Lycra," and that HP's now-disgraced dictator given the moniker of Carlton P. did not feminize her name quite so drastically as to be "Cary" Fiorina.

Like the author, I'm a big fan of iTunes and iPod because they both have rekindled my love for my music. Though the author and I have different tastes in music, I appreciate how he shares his love of music and the ways it has influenced his life. Jones is a lover of all forms of music, collecting more albums and CDs that most of us will do in a lifetime. In between these chapters about his own life, he chronicles the evolution of the iPod and how Steve Jobs and Apple have used it to bring about a real revolution in the music industry.

The iPod's ease and compact attraction to music lovers has moved it far from the realm of the computer geek, and author Dylan Jones explores this phenomenon in considering the music's effect on the ipod and visa versa. From the origins of the ipod idea by Steve Jobs to the latest phenomenon of 'podcasting', IPod, Therefore I Am: Thinking Inside The White Box is for any who would understand where the future of music is heading.

I'm an on and off again music fanatic and having bought a color iPod and an iPod nano in the last 60 days, I'm on a music jag at the moment. In this state, this book is like water to a very thirsty person in the desert. For me this is a page-turner. Really great personal insights and humor.