A few days ago, while ordering my piece, I found the first and only iPod I had among the millions of notebooks and junk. It was the first one that came out, in 2001, and my dad decided to give it to me for my birthday. I knew that I loved listening to music and that expanding my musical repertoire would probably become one of my favorite hobbies. But what he couldn’t predict was the number of hours he would spend downloading music to his computer.
And is that standing there with this device (now obsolete) in my hands, touching that button in the middle and the spinning wheel – what a great satisfaction to spend whole minutes turning it to find that particular song – I remembered all the times what I’d come to my dad’s house to turn on his computer, open LimeWire or Kazaa, and download all the songs that I had written down on my agenda during the week. That was the most precious outlook for Friday afternoon. Because in her house there was a much more modern computer than the one we had in my mother’s house, in addition to all the latest download applications, so I knew that there she would find everything she was looking for. In a sense, it was one of the things that motivated me the most about spending a night at his house.
And then I would arrive, say hello, leave my backpack in the room and go straight to the computer desk, which is in the middle of the living room. I’d type in the song and let all the downloadable files unfold in front of my eyes. In an effort to keep track of them – they were appearing little by little and with increasing speed – my gaze would start up and quickly scan down each one of them. There he began to tighten.
I tried to avoid those files that had many random letters in between or that had a word in Russian or some other language that for my age was indecipherable. At times he had the criterion of saying “no, these seem to me to be of doubtful origin.” But I would be lying if I said that there was a very articulate selection criteria, because in reality sometimes I would press 20 files in the same search, almost blindly, to make sure at least one was unloaded.
At the same time, I opened MSN and spoke with my colleagues, many times to tell them that I had come to download music and that the following week I could lend them my iPod so that they could listen to it during recess. I don’t even want to think how many viruses I have let in. I still do not quite understand the relationship between file downloads and viruses, but I have no doubt that many of the ones I downloaded on those platforms were of unknown origin, had a questionable origin at least, and came loaded with something else.
And why talk about the titles. If the search put Nirvana Heart Shaped Box, the options that appeared said anything but that. You were more likely to find a file called “xxNi00stNirvana0044” than the actual name of the song. But even so, I would reach out and squeeze. And then, to find it on my iPod, since it had gone under that weird name, I had to start decoding hieroglyphs.
At times my father’s wife would come and ask me for the computer to work. I would glance at her and pass it on reluctantly, but I left the volume on so I could hear the sound that warned that the download was complete and completed. When it played, I would stop excited and go to the computer to see what song had been downloaded. She opened the program and showed me, because she knew that if I didn’t, I could stay there for several minutes standing next to her.
I do not know how many songs I have downloaded in total, I do not know if they are still archived somewhere. I was mutating that download habit and transferring it to other platforms: now I download movies through Torrent, but I am a little more careful in the selection. Even so, it makes me sad to think that with Spotify and YouTube, few teenagers will feel as hackers as we do, who spent hours downloading unfiltered music and connecting with millions of users and metadata anywhere in the world.
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