Oww…

The first day of the New Year is always the most painful. This is largely to do with the severely unhealthy alcohol habit most of us have, compounded with our communal masochistic desire to be as inhumanly inebriated as possible the minute before midnight (just in case the world ends). More bathrooms are used for bedrooms, more bad disco is trolled out like its 1979, and more people quit drinking forever the morning after. There are also some good points.

But this being a music site and us being music critics, we tend to doll up our preferred choices around for everyone to see. I am far more than anyone sorry I missed being a part of the top 15 picks from Radio Exile, but I was away on vacation and had next to no free time. They are all fantastic picks, and in and of themselves make one of the best playlists of all time. The various writers here at RE have exhausted themselves in good taste, and it should be everyone’s privilege to take a crack at listening to those 15 records. I know I’ll be catching up on the few I haven’t already digested.

In fact, it’s probably a good idea to spend the first bit of 2009 going through all your favorite sites’ top 10s, 20s, or 97s. But what if you couldn’t, all of a sudden? What if, through no fault of your own, your ability to listen to your music was taken away. Let’s say a glitch in the program automatically shut down your mp3 player, essentially bricking it?

People who bought the original 30 gig Zune are feeling that reality this morning, as a problem with the dating system (it doesn’t like leap years, apparently) shut a good majority of them down. The only fix is to “wait until tomorrow” as the dating problem should fix itself. The problem isn’t affecting new Zune owners, but that’s not the point. Thousands of people use the original Zune, and for the time being, they can’t listen to anything, new or old.

There are many good arguments for connecting us all. Pandora, imeem, music blogs like this one, and more advanced programs like the Zune Pass allow music to spread far faster and be appreciated by far more people than anything we’ve had before. But connection comes at a price, and this Zune problem shows exactly that. With a simple dating error, everything falls apart. Much like the staggering pain from a new years’ hangover (every word I’m writing hurts), the idea that one’s music device could simply go “poof” is far more harrowing.

The “what-ifs” are terrifying. If a simple leap year problem could shut down a slew of Zunes, how easy would it be to disrupt the entire fleet of iPhones or the whole gaggle of XM/Sirius radios?

(Microsoft is handling this with a good bit of humor at least. One Twitter post on the Zune page says “we will update the firmware before 2012.”)

Its with this awful but totally relevant conspiracy theories that I’ve found a pretty good resolution for 2009: Diversify my listening habits. Putting one’s eggs in one basket is a bad idea, and music is no different. For the majority of 2008 I’ve been an iPod Touch man. But the idea that my computer or my iPod could just die at any moment is pretty damn sad, so I’m reaching out. I got a new record player for Christmas to replace my busted one, so I can go back to buying records. As for finding new music, XM radio is probably the best resource I’ve found. The iPod Touch is still my preferred “to go” device, so that stays too. Perhaps I shouldn’t get rid of those old CDs I’ve still got laying around. Maybe the tapes should stay too.

This entire decade has been about finding out just how we should deal with the problem of mediums. CDs began to die. Records resurged. MP3 players, both isolated and connected to one another, became dominant devices. Tapes became romanticized.

Perhaps the answer is that we need all of them. That way, if one goes down, we’re not totally fucked.

…Now, back to the couch to watch BET’s top videos of the year. Owwwww.

Last 5 posts by K Sawyer Paul

• All of Us/None of Us - Arcane and Abel Review - April 10th, 2009
• Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound - When Sweet Sleep Returned Review - April 9th, 2009
• Peter Bjorn & John - Living Thing Review - April 2nd, 2009
• AC Newman - Get Guilty - February 18th, 2009
• Lanterns. - Apocalypse Youth Review - February 17th, 2009