Blag Delilah Of The Dwarves Puke On iPod

The Dwarves outspoken frontman has written an interesting article about iPod and how it has "poisoned" the experience of listening to music and building the careers of "no-talent" artists. Blag Dahlia writes:

"When I was in high school, a new product came out that everyone had to have called the Walkman. A portable cassette player, it allowed you to have music wherever you went, and effectively cut you off from the rest of the world. Now, the iPod has created a product even more disturbing that allows assholes to have noise on demand 24 hours a day.

Call me old fashioned, but I like to hear the birds in the trees, the hum of lawnmowers, the exultant sound of homies shooting each other over drug turf. In iPod world, all music is equal: it all sounds the same because it's just content without context. Where is the album cover? Where is the high fidelity? Where is the older brother of your best friend forcing you to hear something new while teaching you how to bong out properly? Now he's got his own iPod and is lost in his own inane, pre-digested musical wasteland. It's every man for himself in iPod world. Music is for special occasions. It's not wallpaper to blast every waking moment of your day. If we can all agree Ashlee Simpson should be sodomized by a tribe of Amazonian cannibals (metaphorically speaking), then why are we still exposed to her music? Blame iPod Nation.

The iPod Nation is consciously aware of how badly she sucks, of course. But, since all content is equal in iPod world and every 10 year old has Ashlee Simpson name recognition, she is vaulted to the status of multi platinum no-talent who looks like she has had Karl Malden's nose grafted onto one of the Olsen twins bodies. You don't even have to be cute anymore to be considered cute in iPod world. Consider the fat guy from Good Charlotte. I'm 40 years old and I know I look better naked than he does. Yet, his iPod music fits his iPod body like an iPod glove.

And has anyone heard a tolerable podcast yet? The good ones sound like, how can I put this? Radio. Why this is considered a new frontier and a radical reworking of the communications paradigm is a mystery to me. iPod Nation craves content, 24/7/365 content regardless of how lame that content might be.

Music should be an artistic human endeavor, not a technology capable of progressing along scientific and evolutionary lines. The iPod is not progress, it's regress. The price you pay for more access to more stuff is worse content and too much detritus to pick through.

For those of you stuffing your hard drive with cool old music, consider this. Back in the day, live performances quickly separated the untalented from those that could please an audience. By contrast, the modern music industry now sees live performance as a way to sell a record it has already made.

Without the audience to winnow out the garbage, and with multi national corporations gambling millions on meager are and major marketing, a lot of the good stuff out there never gets heard. People haven't gotten less talented over the last 50 years, it's just that so many untalented people are allowed in the game now that it only seems that way.

But, you can help to solve this terrible dilemma with a few basic steps. First, cram all the Dwarves songs you can on your iPod. Then throw the fucking thing away and buy our god-damn records!"


(punkbands.com)