iWyrms: Annivyrsary 2001
ISSUE #149
The ear is riddled with imperfections. It's not the hi-fi machine companies want you to believe, simply flesh and cartilage molded over centuries of time. Take any two tones less than a half-second apart and the ear will hear them as one; less than a half-step apart on the scale and it will melt them into one pitch. Heed not the marketers from Tidal—the ear was trained only to keep us from the night’s hunters.
It's 2001: CDs are excessive. Packing 1.4 million bits into a single second of stereo? In reality, we need only 128,000—a mere twelfth the size of what we were sold. Developers of the .mp3 knew this and they aimed to pare it down. It was the year the market adjusted and out came both iTunes and the iPod. I can’t think of the industry’s more consequential duo. Our music was made .mp3 and passed around to everyone.
My rule: don't talk about 2001 on the internet. It's like saying Satan’s name between shivers on a frozen lake. It was destined to open the door to our dystopian century—it was the year Kubrick picked for his space odyssey, after all, a shot called in a way culture hadn’t felt since 1984.
I am not moralizing—my musical education was forged in BitTorrent. My first full discography was Elliott Smith, which I downloaded after that year's The Royal Tenenbaums. Many records, like Death Cab's The Photo Album, became favorites which I now own in every form. The hard drive made its mark on an entire generation as we learned to indulge our thinnest desires.
We didn’t launch rockets to the heart of the universe, but we did find Kubrick’s vision of the natal self. Primal urges dominate our world today. Those in power have learned from Freud; they pull on our urges to eat, to love, to smoke, to dance, to nurture, to hate, to fear. The legacy of 9/11 is not the tragedy itself, but the ways it is used to justify war. It’s not humanity we have to watch out for, but those few with incentive to pull our strings.
Never trust when they tell us we can have it all. There will always be a price.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.