So as you have probably noticed by now, I’m a fan of late 90s-early 2000s electronics and physical media. The website you’re reading this on right now is more or less styled to mimic later 2000s-era personal blogs. So, in the pursuit of turning as much as I can millennium-era, I mostly listen to music from my iPod. Over my junior year summer, I was lucky enough to be given a release-era 2007 iPod touch 8 GB, which has been my daily driver ever since.
I find that using the iPod has a couple of advantages over the average Airpods/Spotify combo that is ever so common nowadays. It forces me to use wired earbuds, which keep me better connected to what’s going on around me, as I can’t just flip on noise canceling, and have to take the conscious action of removing an earbud to engage in conversation. Further, the way the iPod’s music library is structured, being download-based and organized by artist and album, discourages the random dopamine-based listening that’s been normalized by streaming platforms. Much like my record player, it pushes me to listen to entire albums instead of cherry-picking the most popular songs from each artist. I feel that this helps me better understand what each album means, and feel what the artist intended with the sound that the album exudes. Plus, the battery will last me around a week or so of listening, I can hook up the 3.5mm port to my Hi-Fi setup, and using wired headphones gives me a little extra accessorization to my outfits.
Currently, I’ve got the iPod’s 2007 audio outputs cranked to their limits, running 320kbps MP3 audio, which is barely necessary when compared to how the output sounds. However, I generally enjoy the slightly muddier cranked mids that the built-in EQ supplies, as it brings out the synths and guitar of a lot of my older choices.
Now and then I update my library with new albums I’ve been recently invested in. As of right now, my library consists of the following favorites.
- The Backseat Lovers: When We Were Friends
- Basement: Colourmeinkindness
- Beabadoobee: Beatopia
- Burial Etiquette: Mis Suenos Son De Tu Adios Split, A Tale of Two Cities
- Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial, Twin Fantasy
- Childish Gambino: Camp, “Awaken, My Love!”
- The Cure: Staring At The Sea
- Deftones: Around the Fur, Diamond Eyes, Koi No Yokan
- Duster: Stratosphere
- Fleshwater: We’re Not Here to Be Loved
- Frank Ocean: Nostalgia/Ultra, channel ORANGE, Blonde, Slide
- IVE: After LIKE
- Jeff Buckley: Grace
- Julie: starjump / kit, pushing daisies, pg.4 a picture of three hedges, flutter
- Kanye West: The Life Of Pablo
- Ken Carson: A Great Chaos
- KISS OF LIFE: KISS OF LIFE, Midas Touch
- Laufey: Everything I Know About Love, A Very Laufey Holiday
- Loathe: I Let It in and It Took Everything
- LSD and the Search for God: LSD and the Search for God
- MGMT: Oracular Spectacular
- NewJeans: Ditto, Newjeans 2nd EP ‘Get Up’
- Panchiko: D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L
- Radiohead: The Bends, OK Computer, In Rainbows
- Rex Orange County: Apricot Princess
- Slowdive: Souvlaki
- The Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream
- The Smiths: Hatful of Hollow
- Steve Lacy: Gemini Rights
- The Strokes: The New Abnormal
- Thirty Seconds to Mars: A Beautiful Lie
- wave to earth: summer flows 0.02
- Weezer: Weezer (The Blue Album)