When I got to college, my randomly-assigned roommate and I became fast friends. One of the first things we bonded over was music. We both loved The Lumineers’ eponymous debut record that was released the year before our higher education began. But one thing my new friend said left me disturbed. He listened to the album on shuffle!
Over the course of our college career, I did convince him that albums should be listened to in the order the artist intended. I can imagine I told him that you wouldn’t like the Mona Lisa as much if you cut it up and then randomly glued it back together. It was the artist’s job to mediate our experience. Maybe. A decade later, you’ll still never catch me listening to an album on shuffle. But you will catch me questioning what it means to properly enjoy art. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this page.
She’s in the Class A, B, C-Team
I have a conspiracy theory for how Ed Sheeran became one of the world’s most popular artists. It centers on his first hit, “The A Team”. No, this conspiracy doesn’t purport any nefarious activity surrounding how the folksy ballad about a sex worker with a drug problem became a sleeper hit. It has to do with the unexpected boost that the song would get by being played from an iPod in certain situations.
For years, Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team” was the first song that appeared on my iPod when the songs were sorted alphabetically. Because of that, if I ever plugged my iPod into something that would cause it to automatically start playing, I would hear the opening chords to Sheeran’s somber number. In fact, that’s why “The A Team” was the most played song by a wide margin among the first ten songs to appear alphabetically on my iPod. Most of those plays were unintentional. My silly conspiracy is that the red-headed Brit had his song beaten into the heads of people because of this alphabetical accident.
In one sense, alphabetical listening is mostly a quirk of our technological age. Nobody, for example, was listening to Al Jolson’s songs sorted alphabetically 80 years ago. Even if they wanted to, there was no way to really do it. Computers just make sorting objects alphabetically easy. But the contemporary ubiquity of alphabetical order obscures the fact that starting with A and working your way to Z is actually quite radical.
In his book Index, A History of the, Dennis Duncan recounts the surprisingly riveting history of book indexes. Along the way, he captures why organizing ideas alphabetically initially met resistance. Why, for example, would you want to list “Aardvark” near the beginning of an encyclopedia? It likely isn’t something people are looking up often. Shouldn’t you list something a bit more important first?
Alphabetical order is radical because it pays no mind to importance. It allows the listener, reader, or viewer to mediate their own experience, to dive in and find what they want rather than what someone else tells them they should want. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you should sit down and listen to an album alphabetically by the track names. That would be insane. What I’m suggesting is that when we only experience art mediated by the creator of said art, we can miss things.
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