How the desire to have a cool iPod changed Millennials forever
I remember the horrible rising sensation as the cruel question bluntly arrived while I was just minding my own business, wrapped up in headphones: “What are you listening to?” Ostensibly innocuous, in actual fact, this loaded probe, in the teen-speak of 2009, translated to: “Are you cool or a waste of space?” I would desperately fumble in my pocket, hoping to covertly hit skip on my iPod and swipe Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’ out of shameful sight before the inevitable follow-up casually demanding visual evidence was delivered.
This scene was commonplace for a generation. For some reason, when iPods made their way to the playground, it was part of the parlance of the times for fellow teens to simply request to flick through what songs you had on your sacred device. Thus, you had to ensure that what was on there was ‘cool’. It had to be an extension of the personality you were trying to collate within 2GBs of storage.
You’d sit in front of a computer screen that wasn’t yet in colour, debating whether a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds song you had never heard gave a better account of your imagined personality than the new single by CSS. All the while, the constant pressure of an impending phone call from an aunty threatened to wipe the internet out like a familicide cyber attack and added a stressful time constraint to your future identity.
Now, I’m not much of a fan of phrases like virtue signalling, but it’s quite easy to see a direct correlation between this primitive paradigm and our current complex with proudly showcasing our online personas. Personally, I’m a very tentative Tweeter, and the similarities between me plucking up the courage to finally voice a view on there or crack a joke, and deleting it after a like-lustre hour, is highly comparable to risking the teenage upload of Billy Joel’s ‘Zanzibar’ to show I’m a wild and crazy guy into all sorts of music, and promptly removing it after someone who has kissed more girls than me asked “What the hell’s this shit?” while listening to my iPod on shuffle… dreaded bloody shuffle.
It was a cruel time, and even the cool artists of the future couldn’t escape it. Julia Jacklin is one of the finest songwriters that the so-called Millennial era has produced, and even she says: “Over the last couple of years [I’ve been] reconnecting with music that I enjoyed before I was heavily influenced by what I felt I was supposed to like,” she told the Guardian.
“I think that’s a journey everyone goes through; you like all these things when you’re younger, and it’s so uncomplicated, and then it becomes really complicated for like 15 years. You define yourself, at least I did, by your music taste: ‘I am my music taste, I don’t exist except for the things that are on my iPod’,” she concluded. You were also your pants, your fringe, your drink of choice, and most certainly your chosen MySpace song.
Your actual identity was way down on the list. In fact, some of the dullest people in the local area were widely friended on social media platforms thanks to using nicknames like ‘Rapid Eye Movement’ and their clever ability not to choose Queens of the Stone Age but Kyuss, the heavier band Josh Homme was in before he was famous, as their profile song. Most of these people are now settling down into accountancy after a few toxic break-ups and a criminal reprimand, news you caught wind of from a friend who’s still on Facebook.
However, the same iPod-like scrutiny of style is still pervasive among matured Millennials, it has simply mutated into a subtler form. For instance, beer choice is a constantly shifting identity statement: five years ago, holding a pint of Guinness was tantamount to having written Waiting for Gadot; now it is approaching a tipping point of no return, the same that saw Kopparberg tragically fade to the trashcan of saccharine history.
Hipsters are no doubt currently scrolling through the passport stamps of their online persona, desperately searching for Guinness pics to delete in the same way that ‘Little Lion Man’ was culled from all iPods, and we pretended we didn’t once scream, “But it was not your fault but mine” at the top of our lungs in a Topman v-neck in an indie club before Mumford & Sons became overnight wankers when the recession worsened.
Yes, it seems all of our insecurities, snap judgements, desire to have a stance on everything and overt tribalism is rooted, in some ways, to the question: “Can I see what you’ve got on your iPod, mate?” It has also perhaps positively pushed us towards a more progressive expansion beyond the mainstream, but this is a mere beneficial side-effect of an otherwise conceited movement. So, in conclusion, yes, I will go to see Hard-Fi with an old friend on their current reunion tour for a daft laugh, and yes, I will have a hoot; thank you! Life’s too short to worry about it.
