‘Portable Music’ [article]- Published July 2013

I have absolutely no qualms in admitting I dance to car alarms. 

I’ve been known to ‘box some beat’ to an assortment of birdsong and have hummed away merrily to the drone of the fruit juicer at work.

I spent the run up to my formative years being referred to as “Biffer” Re: my penchant for drumming on tables/ pets/ family members with a squeaky blue hammer and I 100% agree that baked beans are “the musical fruit”. I do believe “the cacophonous legume” would be more apt but Heinz have been ignoring my emails.

If, like myself, you have a constant 4/4 beat running through your head you can hear music wherever you are and it’s that idea of providing a soundtrack to everyday life that everyone finds so tantalising and subsequently why there are over 300 million Apple brand music players sitting in peoples pockets quietly waiting to break one day after your warranty expires.

I remember my first Walkman clear as day. It was my step dad’s and it lived in the shed.
The Walkman that is, not Alan.
It was covered in sawdust and the pause button didn’t work properly but it was systematically placed in my possession and subsequently returned to the shed until it eventually became mine... and I loved it like the fat kid loves cake.

The thrill of taking music wherever I wanted never wore thin.
Unfortunately the thrill of only having one tape waned fairly sharpish.

After that I was utterly hooked and over the next 12 years accumulated what can only be described as a gaggle of assorted portable media solution devices:

3 portable cassette players
2 Discmans/men/persons

3 Minidisc players

2 nondescript Mpeg Layer 3 devices

2 boomboxes

And a grand total of 4 iPod’s.

I’ve fallen foul many a time to the ‘charms’ of my laptop’s speakers instead of taking that 3 foot stretch to plug her in to a set of lovely Yamaha’s and it’s because of that ease of use provided by a portable medium that we find more and more music geared towards al fresco listening. People are now even able to create music in the great outdoors by utilising entire production suites that fit in the palm of your hand. Admittedly it has to be an abnormally large hand but who are you to judge? At some point the ability to hold 3 ruby red grapefruit in one span is going to come in really useful and the cries of ‘Big Mitts Belshaw’ will fall on deaf ears.

Being able to purchase music from iTunes while out and about was something that always irked me though. Mainly because the adverts propagated the idea of buying Jack Johnson and Norah Jones on the fly. No one should be given the opportunity to do that. It’s a matter of ethics. Also, allowing a major corporation access to your listening habits and inviting them to provide you with inspiration is only going to end in tears.

It pains me that people like tubby hipster James ‘LCD Soundsystem’ Murphy can conscientiously decide to produce an album (2006’s- “45:33”) in collaboration with a major footwear company that’s single purpose is to provide the soundtrack to a perfect workout.

The excitement that surrounds portable tunage is that you can take the music from home out of it’s domain. Drown out the mundane diegetic sounds of life and score your own as you see fit. Create exquisite juxtaposition’s of clamour and serene vista’s and provide yourself with a level of escapism the confines of your home could not see fit to loan you.

Not run through your town centre’s mandatory fountain complex quaffing a Starbucks while you consume the bastard love child of corporate idiocy and trend humping in which a podgy sell out merchant paradoxically tells you the best way to shed a few pounds.

Like a bomb in a bookshop, certain people just want to destroy something novel.

It makes no real odds to me though. I’m totally under the influence.

I now can’t imagine being without music on my person. There is a generation emerging that were practically born with an iPod in their hands and the phenomenon knows no class boundaries. It provides to all and sundry. One and all. And eventually people will begin to take it all for granted.

But, if you can remember the time you left your girlfriend and her mates at the campsite, took a 30 minute walk through sharp bushes and winding rock paths, perched yourself in a throne of boulders and watched the sun set into the sea with ‘Narayan’ by the Prodigy as your soundtrack...

Then you remember why you got so excited the first time you blew the sawdust away and pressed play for the first time.