Name That Tune

My wife Valerie gave me a new iPod last Christmas, the swoopy, black 80GB model. Evidently 80 gigs enable you to upload a lot more than just music. You can upload...movies! Yay! Isn't technology great! It grants a new boon to stupidity every week! Now you're going to see morons on the subway watching Johnny Depp on a 2-inch screen for no other reason than because they can. You know, like you see morons conducting telephone conversations at the very same moment the supermarket cashier is trying to ask them if they have any coupons to redeem, while the five people waiting in line behind them fume at the delay they're causing by exercising their right to multi-task. Because they can.

But I didn't sit down this morning to grumble about the ubiquitous modern phenomenon of nitwits armed with cell phones. I sat down to grumble about something else.

I've noted on this blog before that my wife Valerie sweats the big stuff, while I sweat the small stuff. She got upset last year when our house in Spokane, Washington nearly burned down. I looked around, heaved a sigh and started cleaning the black soot off my CD collection. I haven't finished that job yet. But she wants me to stop grumbling about cell phones. I can't. She lets little things like house fires get her down. I'm bugged by stupidity. Especially when some manifestation of it keeps coming back, like a pesky mosquito buzzing around your ear at 3 a.m.

To call me a music lover would be like calling Tiger Woods a duffer, Mikhail Baryshnikov a hoofer or Pope Benedict a guy who happens to be Catholic. My life is awash in music, at all times, and there is not very much music I don't like. I generally don't care for country music, but like it now and then. I usually find R&B just annoying, but not always. I dislike Gospel because of its pretensions, but that doesn't mean there aren't beautiful gospel tunes out there. Bob Dylan would go along with me on that, I'm sure. I won't say anything about rap or hip-hop because I don't consider barnyard noise to be music, and speaking of barnyard noise, I waited years for heavy metal to go away, and I see that the three patron saints of music, Cecilia, Louis Armstrong and Mozart, have finally granted my wish. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Musicum.

Just about everything else is fine. Or better than fine. From Russian liturgial chant to the 1990s band The Bo-Deans. From Harry James to Wagner. From Miles Davis to Giovanni Paisiello. It's all great.

But forms of musical expression are like vases: they come in all shapes. And it REALLY bugs me that the age of the digital download has decided to apply one word to every form of musical expression on earth. In a facile act of pandering to the dumbshit under-30 crowd with its horseblindered, sound-bit, channel-surfing, text-messaged view of the world around it, iTunes and its clones have decided that everything in the universe is a "song." The iPod generation knows of no other form of music except the "song," and iTunes is only too happy to accomodate its breathtakingly broad ignorance.

My iTunes library currently contains what iTunes insists on calling "3,917 songs." That's perfectly okay if you're talking about "Love Me Do," "One For My Baby," "Help Me, Rhonda" or "Closer to Free," all of which are on my computer and much more.

But I have news for all of you pod-wearers out there. (I won't use pods, by the way. They keep slipping out of my ears. I stick to old-fashioned headphones.) The first movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor ("Resurrection") is NOT a "song." Neither is the prelude to Act I of "Parsifal," nor the Prelude, Toccata and Fugue in C major by J.S. Bach, nor the "Adoration de la terre" section of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

To call everything a "song" is to slight much of the greatest music ever written. It's as if they're saying, "We'll grudgingly make room among Mariah Carey and Miley Cyrus for all that highbrow stuff, but we're going to call it what WE call music, and we only have one word for it, because pop music is the only kind we know or care about." Troglodytes.

People Magazine, which I'm proud to say I haven't looked at since 1996, used to get my goat by doing this same thing. Their weekly music column was entitled "Song," as if they were refusing to even acknowledge that there's any other kind of music except the kind that spews out of VH1 all day long. I wonder what Vladimir Horowitz would have thought of seeing his picture in People magazine in a section called "Song." I don't think he had much of a singing voice, but gol-dang, could he play the pie-anna.

A simple compromise would have saved the download universe having to listen to this rant. Why in the world couldn't they call these things "tracks?" That's what they are. That's what they're called on CDs. I have no problem with the word "tracks," because it covers anything and everything on a CD, an LP or even an old-fashioned cassette tape. A track is a track, whether it's the "Liebestod" from Tristan and Isolde , some nasal idiot in a cowboy hat whining that he's off to git drunk 'cause his wife dun left him or Ice-T screaming that he wants to kill the whole police department. Trax is trax.

But trax ain't "songs," just as all horses may be quadrupeds, but not all quadrupeds are horses.

Now excuse me, I gotta make tracks.