I’ve had a very rewarding, but rather dull day.

In the days before digital music players, you’d take a 7″ or 12″ vinyl record, a cassette, or a CD and you’d play it using the appropriate piece of equipment.  You listened to the music, enjoyed it – or not, but invariably, a track would be listened to in full.

Albums were compositions of related songs, often based on a theme that developed from one track to the next, and you’d absorb the whole thing, drawing your own inferences as to the meanings of the music, the words, and that.  After reaching the end, it was tempting to listen again, and again.

Enough of my love for Bros and Kylie.  These days, with the advent of MP3 and listening to music on iPods, Zens, PCs, our relationship with music is so transient.  I find it difficult to get the end of a single track, let alone to listen to a whole album.  But I wonder whether music has moved on too?  Does an album still contain those individual compositions, eached linked by a common theme?  Who knows?  I haven’t listened to entire album in such a long time.  Instead, I have all the music I care to listen to loaded onto an MP3 player, where I listen to all the tracks on shuffle play, often skipping many of them before they even get going.

Being pretty good when it comes to recognising music: I can usually tell what I’m listening to within a couple of seconds of it starting, but sometimes I get duped it it’s an obscure album track – obviously – or something crappy world music that I downloaded in the misguided hope of expanding my musical horizons, but have failed to delete.  So I come to listen to my music on shuffle play and I find myself stumped as to the identity of a track.  It often helps that the artwork for an album is displayed on the lovely screen of my iPod Touch, which I can see from the comfort of my sitting position all the way over to where the shiny device of genius sits in its docking station.  But herein lies the problem: since I don’t usually get my music from iTunes, a lot of my albums didn’t have the artwork associated with it on the player, so I’d have to actually get up and look at my iPod so I could see what was playing.

My life really sucks at times, doesn’t it?

Having a full library of the music artwork would obviously forewarn me that a track from El Guincho’s Alegranza, or some other crap was next up as I sit skipping track after track.  It’d also allow me to know when a track that I actually liked was coming on.

Because of this, I spent the day downloading and associating all the missing album art for the music on my iPod, all of it.  How tedious, but as I said, how very rewarding.

I could always delete the stuff that I don’t like, but I might just get a bang on the head one day that changes my musical tastes.

Apparently, my dislike of most rap and hip-hop music, and that awful southern African music with the guitars and the deep male voices actually makes me a racist!  No, I’d say it makes me somebody with decent musical taste.

Guitar man

I tried to play my guitar last night.  It’s so difficult!  I started playing when I was about eight and it was so hard to stretch my tiny fingers over the fretboard, but I worked hard at it and was actually quite good at it.  Did exams and everything – passed them, even got distinctions in a couple of them (or whatever you get when you’re quite good).

I’ve forgotten it all now.  And my fingers, despite being a little bit bigger than 25 years ago, are so very very weak.

Fuck it though, I can’t even get through a single track without needing to skip to the end so I’ve got no hope of making my way through a piece of sheet music without getting bored half way through.