My iPod hates me…and people of color

I have this problem with my iPod, “The Egg and We” as iTunes knows it.  I select a song, which The Egg plays just long enough for me to recognize and build some excitement, and then it cuts to the next track.  This auditory tease repeats, often through an entire album.

I first notice the phenomenon while listening to Tracy Chapman.  A couple of strums short of talking about a revolution, I am jolted to the next track.  I adapt easily, soon piqued to learn how fast your car is and what it might do for our future, but am again left ignorant and unsatisfied by this mysteriously ornery Egg.

Spinning my cursor back to the beginning of the alphabet, I try another staple – Al Green.  The Egg manages one “baby” but is apparently no longer glad you’re mine.

I am no longer baffled, but incensed. Al Green!  Is nothing sacred?

Perhaps it’s only the older tracks that are experiencing technical difficulty, something to do with overuse (the obvious tech-savvy hypothesis).  I move through the A’s down to, that’s right folks, Alanis Morissette.  Yes, I still have this and yes, it is still good.  No, I am not currently accepting criticism about my inability to let go of 90’s music.  The Egg apparently also likes Alanis, playing through the album and providing the perfect opportunity for a bad joke about irony.  I will let it pass.

I continue listening and, one after another, artists succumb to The Egg’s conspiring will: Erykah Badu, Janet, even Michael Jackson.  When it refuses Shakira and Juanes in a single session, I reach a disturbing conclusion: my iPod is racist.

Further experiments on The Egg provide deeper insight into its bigoted nature.  Tegan & Sara, the money card of would-be disenfranchised musicians, play normally, ruling out any anti-queer, -foreign or -female sentiments that the device may have been harboring.  Perhaps the name is to blame.  “The Egg and We” is a restaurant in Nabokov’s Pnin.  Like my iPod, the WWII era was not the most welcoming to artists of color.

A final test, however, puts the Holocaust theory to rest.  The Egg plays Matisyahu without skipping an “Adonai”.

Someone(s) should be fired

Who picks the music that plays during end credits? Whomever it is, in many cases, s/he is doing an abominable job. End credit music should be fun but not memorable, or jumpy and fresh enough to get you to sit through and actually enjoy some extra clips that they have tacked on to get you to acknowledge the otherwise never-watched list of people who don’t matter…to you.

So what is Melissa Etheridge doing at the end of “An Inconvenient Truth”? Or Bryan Adams in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”? The Melissa Etheridge song has a message, sure, but it’s hokie dyke rock at the end of a film intended to reach and sober a broad audience. Give me a break. It made me laugh at the end of a most unlaughable two hours. Shameful.

And Bryan Adams? Stay within the era kids! Yes, it’s a love story that ends with a marriage and its release-date was at the height of BA’s reign in soft rock. The film, though, did an otherwise admirable job of maintaining a serious and dated tone, dated in the early 19 1190’s . Again, shameful.

Perhaps this is what W. means about history being the ultimate judge: relying on pop music is a great misstep, as what is pop today will inevitably NOT be tomorrow. Yes, I’m sure that’s it.

dashing through the snow?

So it’s the season. It’s unavoidable. Especially because I decided to go to a Catholic country. Of all the things to consider while choosing a destination and travelling, I never suspected that la Navidad would be such an integral part of the experience. As one might expect, people here love Christmas, especially the kids. Last week I was living with a family with three little girls who have the longest holiday break imaginable, giving them nothing better to do than hang around the house singing Christmas carols and watching “Espiritu” (‘Spirit’, the incredible Disney movie that warrants its own post).

The carols, though, there is something so troubling about hearing Christmas carols here and it’s not the spanish translations. Actually, the fact that they are in spanish make them infinitely more bearable than the inundation that I would be receiving were I still in the U.S. What has been bothering me, or at least making me shake my head at the world a bit, is that in this tropical country Christmas is still associated with, well, “dashing through the snow”. What’s up with that? This just screams globalization in all its great irony (perhaps only the Alanis Morrisette variety). Were these songs written in Hollywood? Does it prove the commercialization of the holiday to such an extent that it doesn’t even have to make sense, environmentally?

I don’t know, this is half rant half giggle for me. What I really want to hear is a song about Santa on a beach…in Oklahoma. Is it too soon after the storm for that one? My apologies, Oklahoma. Too easy.