Fear

I have a 16 gigabyte iPod touch that I am usually too lazy to sync with my iTunes. Even though 16 gigabytes is a lot of music I end up listening to songs several times. The last time I programmed the touch was in August. I have an older iPod nano with half the memory that is programmed to sync with whatever is in my iTunes "Recently Added" playlist. I sync the nano regularly and listen to it a little more than half the time.

Part of the problem with repeated plays of the same song on the touch is the poor quality of the shuffle. What I've experienced is that it's not a truly arbitrary shuffle; it keeps shuffling the same tunes over a fairly limited song cycle. But recently I've discovered that rather than selecting "Songs" one selects "Genres," and then selects a particular genre such as "Alternative & Punk," as I did last week; then using the shuffle function at this point one gets a much more "true" shuffle. I've listened to songs the last few days that I haven't heard since I programmed the touch last summer.

Two songs from No Thanks! The '70s Punk Rebellion have surprised me, and I don't know why because I've heard them many times before. On Monday I listened to The Mekons "Where Were You?" as if for the first time. Then today it was "I Love Livin' In The City" by Fear. When I was an undergraduate Lee Ving was a big deal. I had a number of friends from Los Angeles and each seemed to have a copy of The Record. And of course everyone regardless of his or her city of origin had seen The Decline of Western Civilization at least twice.