Music for Dinosaurs

I was over at the county library Tuesday afternoon glazing a little jar I made in a class a few weeks ago. There were a half dozen of us there working on different pottery projects. A woman across from me was glazing a mug, another was glazing a bowl. The man on one side of me was constructing a small pot from clay. The woman on the other side of me was painting some ornaments she had made. Next to her a woman carved beautiful flower designs into clay bowls she had made. What we all had in common is that we were older. I’m 50 and I think I was either the youngest or second youngest one at the table.

A discussion about minimum wage—Pennsylvania’s is a lot lower than New Jersey’s in case you were wondering—led to a discussion about music. This because the woman next to me remembered at her first job (when I was three) she was making just over two dollars an hour working at a record store. Folks were reminiscing about vinyl records which have made a comeback. According to the woman who may or may not have been younger than me, there are now 33 RPM singles, mini records. She knows this because she has a teenager.

Her son is 15 and one day he found one of her CDs in the car. He didn’t know what it was. She had to explain it to him, and it was like she was speaking in tongues. She tried telling him that listening to playlists on Spotify, isn’t the same as sitting down and listening to a whole album, but that concept is foreign to the youth.

One woman shared that she thought music sounded the best on CDs. Another agreed, but said the packaging for records was so much better. Everyone was in agreement that 8-tracks were the absolute worst. Complaints ranged from jarring popping noises, to having to use matchbooks or pieces of cardboard to get the tapes to sit right, to when tracks would play over one another.

I’m a little too young to have much in the way of 8-track memories. It was cassettes and records when I was growing up, until the miracle of the compact disc came along. MP3s existed well before the iPod did, but the technology being used to play them was pretty terrible. Then along came the iPod and CDs suddenly became dinosaurs.

I know some will disagree with me, but as far as digital music goes the apex was the click wheel iPod. Things have only gone downhill since then. Years ago the battery in my old click wheel iPod started to wane and I sold the thing at a garage sale. What were you thinking, past Alissa?

I replaced my click wheel with an iPod nano, and then another iPod nano, and that actually was what I was using to listen to music in my car, which is also a bit of a dinosaur, until quite recently when finally my iPod gave up the ghost. Now I have to plug my phone into my car to listen to my music. (Look, it’s an old car, okay?) For reasons I don’t begin to understand when my phone is plugged into my car it does not shuffle but just plays alphabetically from whatever track it happens to be playing at the time. That’s okay, until I get to a song like “My Back Pages,” say, where I have four different versions saved in my iTunes. Yes, my car has a radio. No, I never use it. I find the playlists of any radio stations I can pick up way too limited. I remember seeing once that us Generation Xers have very diverse musical tastes, and I can concur with that. I listen to pretty much everything. Well, except country music. I never got into streaming music. I still buy my songs individually or occasionally as albums because like my car, I am a dinosaur.

A couple of months ago, I was checking out at a store, and when I pulled my wallet out to pay my iPod nano fell out of my purse. The young cashier looked at it with awe. “Oh wow! Is that an iPod?” she asked. She was astounded. It was like I had pulled an ancient artifact out of my purse. I guess to her mind I had. I can’t imagine what would have happened if I actually still had my old click wheel and she saw that.

Anyway, speaking of dinosaurs, I was going to share a picture of my little jar after I added the glaze to it, but, well, this computer is a bit of dinosaur too. I think it’s actually older than that iPod that bit the dust, and it’s definitely starting to show it’s age. Anyway, my photos app froze while I was trying to put this post together. So, you’ll have to settle for the before picture above.