25 Years of iPod Brain

Do you remember the magic of the first iPod, with its clicky little wheel and its insane ability to swallow your entire CD collection? Molly Mary O’Brien does, and in this great piece for Dirt she considers the different ways that we’re shaped by music, and by the ways we listen to it.

I spent the summer of 2004 working at a food establishment that sold “subs, wings ‘n’ things.” My employment was a little dubious; I was 14, which I think was fair game in the state of Vermont, but I got paid in cash and wasn’t allowed to use the deep fryer. My coworker was a woman with a son named Moose; she enjoyed giving me advice for my upcoming high school experience. (“Go to class”). My boss was fond of sending customers off with full-sized bottles of ketchup in their to-go bags. I spent a lot of time pressing raw potatoes through a metal french fry cutter into a big plastic bucket. At summer’s end, I brought a stack of cash to Best Buy and bought a fourth-generation iPod. Now my life could truly begin.

It’s hard to believe that there was once a time when consumer technology solved problems we actually had. In the late 1900s, one of these problems was the portability of one’s music collection. For a long time, recorded music came in the form of physical objects so large they were inconvenient to tote around. Then the physical objects shrank – into tapes, MiniDiscs, CDs – but it was still not possible to carry your entire music collection around with you without managing some kind of large bindle of rattling plastic.

In 1999, Napster launched, and every song in the history of sound recording transformed into data. What was once a large PVC disc was now code – air, really. Songs in the wind. What would be the best way to carry them with us?

There were mp3 players before the iPod – they just weren’t very good. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs said the pre-iPod mp3 players on offer “truly sucked.” In 2000, a trio of former Apple software engineers wrote a Mac interface for the Rio, a homely chunk of black plastic that held 30 minutes of music and ran off a single AA battery. Their interface was called SoundJam, which Apple then acquired and retooled into iTunes. Meanwhile Jon Rubinstein, who had previously overseen the development of the delicious candy-colored late ‘90s iMacs, sourced components that would make the iPod possible: a small LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a 1.8-inch drive that could fit 1,000 songs. Designer Jony Ive had the idea to make the player white. “Most small consumer products have this disposable feel to them,” Ive said in Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs. “There is no cultural gravity to them.”

Does all “cultural gravity” come from extreme opposition, Kurt Cobain’s limp, greasy mop after a decade of crunchy, puffy hairdos? The iPod’s contrast was celebrated in iconic advertisements: pitch-black silhouettes of dancers holding snow-white iPods. The first song played publicly on an iPod was Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Building a Mystery’, at the launch event in 2001. A lovely song, but it smells as strongly of the 1990s as a bottle of Clinique Happy. The later iPod commercial songs signified a new kind of aesthetic for the 2000s: high energy, a touch alt, and very eclectic. Hip hop, pop, and rock scored the television spots. The hip hop came hybridized with other genres (Ozomatli, ‘Saturday Night’; Gorillaz, ‘Feel Good Inc.’). The pop was cute (Feist, ‘1234’) or mildly funky (Black Eyed Peas, ‘Hey Mama’). Rock was a little scrappy, always catchy, never too aggressive (Caesars, ‘Jerk It Out’, and of course, Jet’s ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’). And U2 were there, as they often were for crucial American cultural resets.

A classic Apple company principle was the ability to “impute” brand identity. Mike Markkula, the first chairman of Apple’s board, described “imputing” as a way to signal to consumers what a brand valued in every aspect of their presentation – not just the product, but the way it was packaged, and the way it was marketed. The iPod marketing associated the product capability (1,000 songs in your pocket) with the obvious extension of that capability: those 1,000 songs should represent your broadest, most excellent taste.

I was imputed upon. The first song I played on my iPod was ‘Anthem Part 2’ by Blink-182. It was a favorite song from middle school, and it felt right to begin with a sentimental choice. But it wasn’t long before I was approaching mp3 collecting with an almost deranged reverence for eclecticism. I needed to max out the hardware’s potential. I needed representation from as many genres as possible. Some of this desire came from the UX itself – when I used my thumb to rotate the pale gray click wheel, I felt a strong desire to scroll through a long list of artists, with each letter of the alphabet represented many times over. So Blink-182 got nestled between Black Sabbath and Bloc Party, followed by Billy Joel and Blonde Redhead. 

When I went home for Christmas a couple of years ago, I unearthed a high school notebook in which I’d plotted purchases from the iTunes store, culled from recommendations in music magazines (‘Men’s Needs’ by the Cribs, almost assuredly pushed by NYLON) and references in books (The KLF’s ‘Justified and Ancient’, featured in Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape). The list was so analog and earnest that it makes me cry. I used to collect music like butterflies – you had to watch them fly by, swoop them in a net, pin them to a board. This is how I learned to care about music. You had to really want it.

The iPod expanded your palate while shrinking your record collection to ultimate portability. Friends or strangers could swipe through your library and clock your musical id in an instant. But unless you offered an earbud to a friend, your collection was still private. Portability did not extend to sharability. Liam Inscoe-Jones, author of Songs In The Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age, notes that the first Sony Walkman was fitted with two headphone jacks; the Sony engineering team assumed no one would want to listen to music by themselves. “The introduction of the iPod accelerated a process which was already begun with the invention of home stereos: the transformation of music from something normally experienced communally, to something enjoyed individually; now as an actual means of isolation.”

Still, what the iPod lacked in communal features – in the early ‘00s, we were still a little ways away from mass adoption of the Bluetooth speaker, as well as its festive cousin, “smartphone in plastic cup” – it made up for in ecstatic musical exploration. I asked my dad, a younger boomer who had already had to re-purchase his vinyl collection twice over before going digital, about his iPod acquisition. “I’m sure I got one because it became something EVERYONE had and I didn’t want to feel left out,” he said. Did it expand his taste? “1000%. It gave me access to and the desire to listen to artists I never would have purchased in the old days.” A devotee of Tom Petty and the Beatles, my dad now maintains a playlist of his top De La Soul songs. 

Golden ages are always too short. The launch of the iPod Touch, which was nearly identical to the iPhone which would soon kill it dead, signaled a frictionlessness that would soon overtake all aspects of tech. Spotify launched in the United States in 2011, and no one had any good reason to collect digital music any longer. Six years later, Apple had discontinued all of their dedicated music players.

Still, the iPod’s aura has the potential to span multiple generations. There was a TikTok trend around New Years’ where people posted montages of photos of iPods and old digicams, with the caption “in 2026, we’re bringing old technology back… spread the word.“ (I recently heard an anecdote about a millennial mom who gave her daughter an early gen iPod in order to provide a music player without Wifi connectivity – it was promptly stolen after school at the Boys & Girls Club, proving the iPod black market might be heating up.) And last year, the Australian electronic artist Ninajirachi released a song called ‘iPod Touch’. “I’ve got a song that nobody knows / And I heard it in a post when I was 12 years old,” she sings. Ninajirachi is a decade younger than me – she was born in 1999, the year of Napster – the iPod Touch that I thought was too polished was just right for her (hers is in a Pikachu case, and has a “little crack in the screen”).

In an interview with The Needle Drop, Ninajirachi talked about listening to her iPod Touch on the schoolbus: “I didn't have the Internet, and I just had the songs that were on my device… the music, when you spend that much time with it, seeps so much deeper into your brain versus just skipping to the next thing that you have.” Maybe this is the essential blessing of the iPod: the software gives you the potential for an unlimited musical library, but the hardware’s limits still lock you into a committed relationship with the songs you choose. Developing my expansive taste was obsession; tending my library was devotion; actually listening to it was true love.

Dirt is a next-generation entertainment brand using emerging technology to tell the coolest stories about culture and collecting.

Molly Mary O'Brien is a writer living in Los Angeles. She has a music blog called I Enjoy Music and a music podcast called And Introducing.

Álvaro Jiménez (Alnez) is an illustrator and art director based in Barcelona. After working in advertising for over 10 years, he transitioned into illustration and freelance creative work. His practice is defined by strong conceptual thinking, dynamic compositions and bold colour palettes, creating a symbolic visual language shaped by influences from cinema, advertising, classical art and the occult. You can see more of his work on Instagram.

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