The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness

This story originally appeared in the Baltimore City Paper.

Here's a handy little trick from the artist's proverbial toolbox: Whenever you find yourself slogging through some new creative endeavor and the results just aren't working, break the work into discrete components and rearrange them in some random fashion. Better yet, have them rearranged by some external process beyond your control.

It's not new technique -- William Burroughs fashioned several of his novels by jiggling the sentences into a nonsensical order. Brain Eno constructed musical compositions where machines or humans play simple melodic lines at varying speeds and intervals, in effect creating ever-unfolding pieces with no set score.

This hands-off approach sometimes gooses flagging art into something more appealing for the simple reason that random rearrangement creates juxtapositions not originally conceived. It removes the artist -- and all his or her tired ideas -- from the process, allowing the components to find their own connections with one another.

Music fans are starting to hap upon the power of this approach, thanks to the simple fact that pretty much every digital music player comes with a feature that plays tracks in random order. Almost all CD players have this feature, but the full power of randomization doesn't make itself known until you subject all your albums to such fragmentation. Then your computer or handheld device can play an ever-unfolding personal radio show, one that offers glimpses into your music you never considered before.

Steven Levy's The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (Simon and Schuster, 2006) portends to investigate the implications of randomization, at least as it is manifested through the shuffle mode of Apple Computer's massively popular iPod music player. Part corporate history and part cultural analysis, the book devotes each chapter to a different iPod aspect: how it was built, how it was designed, podcasting. Other chapters are devoted to Apple itself, the art of the playlist, and how randomization affects listeners.

The reader's copy of the book itself is even randomized, so to speak. After the introduction, the remaining chapters are switched around in various configurations, which may change from copy to copy and which and can be read as standalone entries. But by mimicking the shuffle, Levy only illustrates the approach's weaknesses.

Like many people, I found the power of randomization when I hooked my computer to my stereo and copied all my CDs. Playing music would be less hassle this way -- no getting up to change a CD every 40 minutes or so. If I wanted to listen to Miles Davis for hours straight, I could.

Thing is, I rarely found myself listening to hours of Davis. More often, I just play all the music in a particular genre ("jazz") or even just let the player decide which track to play next. These days the Prince of Darkness is likely to bump up against Biota, George Jones, John Adams, Jill Sobule, or Pavement.

While such jumpiness may at first sound jarring, it flows together surprisingly well. Genres are reduced to little more than marketing terms. You see what Duke Ellington meant when he said, "There are two kinds of music -- good music, and the other kind."

By playing one track after another, you hear similarities between the two you'd never notice if you never played them side-by side. I noticed that buried in the middle of Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" is a smoldering sax and piano interlude that perfectly evokes 1964 John Coltrane; that Philip Glass and Kraftwerk worked simultaneously yet separately to create beauty through bare repetition; and that Blur spent a career sounding like the late-'60s Kinks -- and still didn't measure up, despite the fey production of the Kinks albums.