Low fi  

Norman Lebrecht had an article about the evil that was the Walkman up at La Scena Musicale and I wanted to write a response but it seems to have disappeared (I have some hope that it will return, and I'll be sure to post an update if/when it does). At first I thought I'd be reading an attack on the ubiquity that the Walkman provided, and he made a point about the ability of the listener to control what she's listening to that had some merit. But then he turned a corner and it turned out the article was mainly about the Walkman's poor sound quality: Mr. Lebrecht sees the iPod not as the nefarious modern day heir to the Walkman, but as as almost messianic device.

An argument against the increasing popularity (in the sense of popular availability I guess) of mobile music would have at least had an elitist zing -- and along this dimension there are plenty of ways to critique the seemingly harmless Walkman. The ability to control one's own musical consumption, the ability to duplicate music easily/mix-and-match, the ability to create a private musical sphere that excludes others from listening -- all of these could be seen as tremendously subversive developments for music, perhaps especially for the classical listener (ie Mr. Lebrecht) because they play havoc on the traditional

composer-->performer-->audience

Am I suggesting that Mr. Lebercht has ulterior motives for this bizarre rant against the Walkman? I don't know. I certainly don't share the hypothetical criticisms I suggested above -- in fact, for me maybe the Walkman itself was the messianic device, ushering in a transformation in intellectual property and the commons.