RIP the iPod

We're in mourning. 

We're in mourning. 

The iPod is dead. After nearly 22 years, Apple will no longer produce the device that changed music consumption forever.

Whilst it’s unlikely that any of us would ever buy an iPod again, we can’t help but feel a little wistful about its demise. 

It’s the one device we’ve witnessed the entire lifespan of. From its arrival in October 2001 and all the experimental iterations since. The nano you could clip onto your clothes to exercise with, the sublimely impractical ‘shake to shuffle’ feature, and, finally, the introduction of the iPod touch. Mind-blowing at the time, it paved the way for the fifth limb we take for granted, the iPhone. 

Listening to music on an iPod was communal and romantic. You had to rely on your most internet-savvy friends to curate the soundtrack to your life. Leaving them your device overnight, to fill with mp3s they’d ripped off Pirate Bay or Limewire. 

Rihanna with her iPod.

It was a musical rumspringa that asked for patience and curiosity. You only had so many songs, and you took the time to listen to them: making your way through Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter II and The Postal Service’s Give Up, courtesy of your best friends' cool older brother. 

Now we have access to everything all the time, which rocks, but it’s weakened our discovery muscle. Why actively seek out new music, when the Spotify algorithm will churn out a Daily Mix filled with the exact kind of music it knows you already like? (Not knocking it — but some of us have been stuck in a ‘Phoebe Bridgers sad girl music’ state of arrested development for most of my adult life.)

We’ll mourn the afternoons spent on the backseat of the school bus: huddled around a 5th generation iPod, watching Rihanna’s glistening body in the ‘SOS’ music video somebody forked out $3 for.

In the spirit of things, The Oz has put together a playlist filled with songs extracted from the darkest crevices of our memory. This is not a parade of fine-tuned taste. There will be no pretending that we knew who Sonic Youth were before they were featured on The Perks of Being a Wallflower soundtrack. This is a fusion of the bombastic pop, crunk, dance, and hip hop that we lapped up in high school, with some sentimental millennial hand-me-downs (largely courtesy of The OC soundtrack.)