The Masthead

This sourpuss rubbed up against Brian Wilson’s SMiLE show on London’s South Bank and came up grinning. On page 88, David Toop writes movingly and accurately about this 1960s masterpiece of Americana that almost never was from the perspective of the American musics of Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Harr y Par tch and Frank Sinatra, rather than from the perceived non-wisdom of Wilson cracking up tr ying to outdo The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper. The American route is a much more helpful approach to understanding the piece itself, even as it might stymie more commonplace attempts to fit it into the Great Rock Canon.

Spilling out from the Royal Festival Hall into Saturday night London quickly restored normal ser vice to this par ticular sourpuss however, when only a fully loaded iPod stood between sanity and transpor t rage on the way home. Here’s one happy bunny who doesn’t subscribe to the notion of “a smug fraternity of iPod ownership”, as Wire writer Adrian Shaughnessy uncharitably put it in his review of Giacomo Spazio’s A New Loop in last month’s Cross Platform section. Hell, it’s only a tool there to be used or abused, and you can imagine that Günter Müller for one is putting it to uses its makers never intended when he deploys it as a noise generator on

Time Travel, the Erstwhile CD he shares with Otomo Yoshihide. But me, I have to confess to being wholly uncreative in my use of it as an overstacked sound carrier. What’s great about it, of course, is that once you’re plugged in you don’t have to speak to anybody again for 17 days straight. And what other sound carrier is capable of carr ying the entire Ring cycle, the complete works of Merzbow, all of Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks archive live sets and any number of Fushitsusha CDs, and still have room for Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”? As a mobile soundtrack to seeing the city’s ripped backsides and all its contents passing the other side of a windscreen, the latter song can’t be beat.

Of course none of this is to imply that the personal soundtracks people pack for themselves before submerging into the city night is anyway comparable to the hear t and soul Brian Wilson poured into the painfully protracted composition of SMiLE. But, as with the Walkman 20 years earlier, this latest carrier permits its users to define the terms of their relationship with their environment and the people around them. It won’t stop anybody punching me right in my smug mouth but it does af ford a degree of protection from all the crazies you are confronted with as you negotiate the long ride home.

Much as I might selfishly champion the iPod for reasons of personal sanity, however, new developments in the field are a little unner ving. Heard the ugly rumours about the coming software that’s capable of transcribing any vocal track into lines of running text with a bouncing ball to facilitate its conversion into a personal mobile karaoke machine? Who hasn’t already seriously embarrassed themselves wailing out an a cappella accompaniment to a Fushitsusha song like “A Death Never To Be Complete” that’s inaudible to ever yone else? Not just me, that’s for sure. If metropolitan life wasn’t tragic enough already with people carelessly stepping in front of trains while reading text messages on their mobile phones, don’t the manufacturers of this fiendish new software realise how things might get a whole lot worse with people going bravely unto their deaths in heavy traf fic while tr ying to bellow along to the bouncing ball lyric of your choice? Not so easy to look smug jacked into an iPod dicing with death and dodging a fishtruck in time to Fennesz’s take on The Beach Boys’ “Endless Summer”, I can tell you.

Here’s to the inauguration of the campaign to get iPod karaoke recognised as an extreme spor t at this summer’s Olympics. CHRIS BOHN

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