iPod Shuffle: evil or inspired?

Angel muses whether we should be leaving your music choices to a piece of plastic...

Freedom to choose. Every emo girl wants to go her own way, make her own decisions and ignore ‘good advice’ from the ‘rents. We pride ourselves on having our own mind – and an expression of this individuality is through the music we choose.

While friends are downloading Amy Winehouse as if their life depended on it, we’re always searching for new bands with big, f*@k off guitar riffs. That’s what separates us. So why do we give our power to choose away…to a mechanical device?

I have a love/hate relationship with my iPod and its shuffle function. It has become my safety blanket, making my musical life far too easy. There are no more intense personal battles and soul searching to decide which CD to listen to in moments of indecision. Nope, I just hand my decision making over to my ‘Pod.

But where does it stop? Should we let Tesco decide what food we want to eat that week through its suggested shopping list? Should we let the Carphone Warehouse tell us which mobile to buy? No way! Once we give up our right to choose we lose our power and individuality. Ladies, it’s time to take the power back! Let the debate commence.

Down with the shuffle

“Indecision is debilitating; it feeds upon itself; it is, one might almost say, habit-forming.” H. A. Hopf

“It's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” Anthony Robbins

Okay, so the last quote is a little extreme but you get the idea. Indecision has a snowball effect. Once you give up your power to decide in one aspect of your life, you might as well give up all round.

My iPod has officially stolen my ability to choose my own music. In moments when I can’t decide what to listen to it’s too easy to select the shuffle option on my iPod. In some ways this is a good thing – it provides music without any of the dithering, and in that sort of mood, often you just want background tracks so it doesn’t matter what comes on. The danger is when you rely on your shuffle facility to select your music all of the time.

There have been plenty of times when I’ve quite fancied listening to a specific band/song but riffling through my mountainous CD collection seems like too much hassle so I click shuffle on the iPod and forget all about that craving. It’s almost like a dumbing down of musical selection. It’s too easy, it’s too safe.

Shuffle also dilutes musical ownership. When you buy a CD by a band you like, you listen to it knowing that everything you hear is by them, which creates a bond between you and the band. If you rely on shuffle, a lot of the time you won’t necessarily know which band you’re listening to unless you check the screen.

The passion is lost and music becomes a background soundtrack rather than your focus. Not to mention that the structure of an album often tells a story, the order the music comes in can be important, and this continuity is broken when you don’t listen to it in sequence.

But c’mon, shuffle’s not all bad

It’s not fair of me to sit here and diss the shuffle option. It’s a clever little iPod addition and it certainly has its uses. When I have it on it often throws up tracks that I had forgotten all about and that I would have scrolled right past had I been selecting my own music. In this way it revives that element of surprise that is usually lost after a CD’s first listen.

And when doing a 70 mile commute daily it’s become a bit of a lifeline – with most punk albums only lasting half an hour, listening to the same CD four times in one day would leave me unable to sleep as the lyrics played on in a never ending loop even after I’d got out of that damn car. This way I get new tunes every time I drive and I don’t have to mess around switching CDs whilst driving.

So use the function, but use it wisely girls. Don’t let it take away your ability to choose or you might end up another mindless clone buying a Chico CD just because they played it on the radio. And nobody wants that!