In this series of posts, I have explored the ways in which recorded music has been used in expressing personal identity through successive consumer technologies and have tried to identify the psychological motives for these uses. As Steven Levy[1] recognised in relation to the iPod, musical taste is extremely self-revelatory even with minimal effort to express it:
Simply handing your iPod over to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book. All someone needs to do is scroll through your library on the click wheel, and, musically speaking, you’re naked. It’s not just what you like — it’s who you are.[2]
While it seems reductive to render individuals as collections of musical tastes, there is enduring evidence of the appeal of doing so in the longevity of Desert Island Discs, which is Britain’s longest-running radio show, first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29 January 1942.[3] The programme’s format both structures life stories and draws personal insights from its guests based on their choice of eight records. This is a subtler and more persuasive approach than pursuing this information through a conventional interview because ‘castaways’ volunteer greater candour through the fantasy of being marooned with an octet of tunes than they might if questioned more directly. The fact that the show has attracted eminent guests consistently for more than 77 years shows that being invited to reflect and reminisce around a few musical choices is an attractive proposition. The premise of the Facebook meme that inspired this series of posts is similar to that for Desert Island Discs, and I found it compelling enough to make the requisite ten album cover posts and to explore my motives here.
Levy’s[4] observation about your digital audio library leaving you ‘naked’, ‘musically speaking’, is not dependent on a commentary (as on Desert Island Discs) for its exposure. The metadata associated with a selection of recordings — artist, musical genre, era of release, etc — can reveal much about its selecter — approximate age, likely gender, sexuality, political leanings — even if nothing is known of the music fan beyond their choices. Assumptions about a playlist’s author do, of course, depend on generalisations that should not go unquestioned. It would be wrong to assume, for example, that a liking for The Beatles or The Rolling Stones suggests someone who is a near contemporary of these bands’ members. While the popularity of these artists has varied since their origins in the 1960s — interviewed by Daniel Rachel[5], Ocean Colour Scene’s vocalist Simon Fowler recalled that, ‘Before Oasis you had to apologise for liking the Beatles. “I love the Beatles but…” Suddenly the Beatles were the best thing since sliced bread, again. Oasis legitimised liking the Beatles, which sounds absurd but it’s true.’ — they continue to appeal to music consumers of all ages. A fondness for the Bay City Rollers, Osmonds or David Essex, however, is likely to imply a 1970s (probably female) teenage.
The outline circulated to nominees for the Facebook album cover postings invited no comment on the chosen artwork, leaving participants to express themselves through these images alone. Instead of acting in Pavlovian obedience to the circulated instructions, I decided to add interest (for me at least) by quoting from the lyrics of one of the tracks on each of the ten albums I posted. My quotation from my seventh choice, Blondie’s Parallel Lines[6] was from the LP’s third track, Picture This.[7] Its lyrics take a radical viewpoint with Debbie Harry (the singer and lyricist) leveling the female gaze by offering, ‘I will give you my finest hour / The one I spent watching you shower,’ but adopt a familiar trope in recalling the elementary romantic mathematical finding that one and one make two. Harry dodges triteness with the spiky suggestion that the song’s object should use a calculator to do the sum — ‘One and one is what I’m telling you / Get a pocket computer / Try to do what you used to do.’ It seemed to me that this stanza summed up the social media activity in which I was engaged. When Blondie released Parallel Lines in 1978, a ‘pocket computer’ was, as I have suggested, a calculator — and that technology might well have needed an outsize pocket to hold it. 40 years later, a ‘pocket computer’ was just that — a powerful microcomputer that might have needed deep metaphorical pockets to own but fitted easily into standard literal ones. Using my smartphone to post ten favourite albums on Facebook was, as I have described in this series of posts, exactly using a pocket computer to do what I used to do.
Notes and references