A little while back, Patton Oswalt wrote on Twitter:
Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” is playing while I, a 42 year-old man, shop for comics. God has just told me to kill myself.
That got me thinking about a problem that has been preying on my mind for quite some time now. (Yes, I’m also 42, and recently started re-reading Sandman, but don’t read that far into it.)
I have a pretty good music library now, and the state of commercial radio today as I have experienced it makes me grateful for that fact. I can go anywhere with my noise-cancelling headphones and have a tolerable soundtrack to my day.
But something subtle has been missing, and I think I’ve identified it.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away — Winnipeg — I sometimes would jump in my car at night and drive out of the city, to park on a back road somewhere and smoke cigarettes and look at the stars and think about what was going on in my life. That car had a radio, period. So I’d listen to the radio.
On an adventure like that, when the radio chooses to give you something like — and you’ll have to forgive me for becoming a Doors fan in my twenties — “Riders on the Storm”, it had a way of being a comfort and an indication that things were right with the world.
You’d think, “okay, I’m not sure where I’m going or what I’m doing, and I’m not going to solve all the problems tonight, but at least, maybe, the universe is not purely a random machine. Maybe it can communicate little kindnesses here and there to let a person know they aren’t completely lost.”
Today, if I make that same trip, and I have my car stereo hooked up to sixteen gigathings of every song I’ve ever heard or wanted to hear, it’s just not the same. The Oswalt quote finally nailed down why, for me…
If you encounter something meaningful at random in the world, there’s an emotional circuit that gets completed between Inner You and Outer Everything Else. Even if it’s a negative experience, a sense of connection is made. It feels like there’s a feedback loop at work.
But when you’re relying on your own collection, no matter how large and no matter how much of it you may have never even heard before, you’re just feeding back into yourself. Select Random if you like, but you’re still in a closed system.
The crucial missing element is your own lack of control. Without that, there’s no magic in the equation. It’s like the difference between sex and masturbation — nothin’ wrong with rubbing one out by yourself, but it generally doesn’t make you walk around like a grinning idiot the next morning at work.
