Tue, April 12, 2005

CNN, "The London Times", and a slew of other media outlets have pounced on the following story about the playlist on George W. Bush's iPod:

Bush bares soul with 'iPod One' [CNN]

This is exactly the sort of non-news "journalism" that should be eradicated completely. CNN should fire Peter Wilkinson and anyone else up the editorial chain who approved this story. Let them work for Drudge, or Page Six. If this is an example of the news media trying to "beat the bloggers at their own game," it foreshadows a pretty hilarious reversal in which the bloggers are the only ones investigating actual news from actual sources, and CNN and the networks are digging up gossip and making dick jokes.

I dislike our president intensely, but there's absolutely no merit in culling through is iPod playlist for a window into his personality. If he'd sat down and filled the thing up with thousands of MP3s off of Kazaa, maybe. But it currently holds only 250 songs, which have been downloaded by a staffer at Bush's request. That's not how you collect deeply personal music; that's how you put a few songs into a cursory playlist for show – either to politely express interest in a gift from your daughters that you wouldn't otherwise care about, or to seem "hip" to a nation of iPod-loving constituents. (And decoding the lyrics is preposterous – if I deleted every song with lyrics I don't agree with, I'd only have a few dozen tracks on my iPod, too.) This has nothing to do with the music he really cares about – and furthermore, it simply isn't news. If he's storing PDBs on there, that's a story.

Interestingly, this tidbit was linked alongside a comment from some indie record honcho:

I feel like there has been created, in the past two to three years, an indie-yuppie establishment. Bands like Death Cab for Cutie, Iron and Wine, the Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, they are great bands, really great bands, with great albums, great songs, high quality. And to me, it’s just so fucking boring. It’s like fancy-coffee-drinking, Volvo-riding music for kids. And kids should be listening to music that shakes them up more, makes them uncomfortable.

Granted, I've only heard of two of these bands, but I still think this is absurd. (And I'm going to let the Volvo crack slide.) I like a lot of music, and I always like trying new music I haven't heard before. But to sincerely suggest that people should be paying good money for music that "makes them uncomfortable"? I'm sorry – that's absurd. I don't even know what that means. It just seems antithetical to listen to a song that you don't like just because you don't like it. Where's the benefit in that?

I'm sure there are people out there who like every kind of music, otherwise those artists would starve. But I'm not going to buy a CD of Björk banging a tire iron against a toilet bowl and squawking meringue recipes in Yiddish just because it makes me uncomfortable. I can be uncomfortable on my own.