Connecting Through Music: In Tune with the iPod Generation

As I retuned to college midlife I rediscovered music through my kids, through MySpace and the internet. It started off quite innocently with a CD my son Sean burned for me of Switchfoot. He assured me I would like it, told me I was most definitely emo. He then explained the world of music as he sees it. He is straight edge hard core. He collects vinyl and frequents Deep Ellum in Dallas, goes to Austin, Denton and Houston following the bands. My youngest son Scott break dances and listens to hip hop and everything with a beat.

In my painting class at the University of Texas at Dallas I was given an assignment. It consisted of taking a photo and cropping it as much as we could without losing the subject matter, simplify the shapes in Photoshop, blow it up on to a canvas and then paint it. I chose a picture from an emotional photographic journal I have been keeping over the last few years. I chose a photo from thousands I have taken. It was one of me laying my head on a quilted pillow listening to my ipod, shutting myself off from my circumstances and listening to music I had personally selected and stored. I shot myself in my own little world. The ironic part about this little world, it that it is a passport into the lives of the young people I know through my 21 and 18 year old sons and the students I attend class with. I listen to their music and thus I speak their language or I try to. As I cropped the photo it worked well in helping me communicate my thoughts on the subject of music and its connections in my world.

The use of my half face in the design plays off the iPod idea, as in one eye. I also made the statement that I am watching these young men and women in my life or keeping an eye on them. There is one ear in the design that communicates the same idea that I am trying to carefully listen to this generation and find out about their music. The quilted pillow behind my head after being manipulated in Photoshop comes across like a cosmos or energy. It says youth, energy, explorations of ideas, in other words, it reaches into their world, discovering how they think. I want to be in their world but I can't be there completely, I stand at the thresh hold and observe.

Listening to and selecting music has changed over my life time. I heard the music first on the radio. Then I went to shows, big shows like the Rolling Stones in Lakeland Florida in a stadium with thousands of people. Then more frequent the small shows by local bands at Timothy's a bar in Dayton Ohio where I grew up. I think shows haven't changed much. What has changed music is the internet. With things like peer to peer music the bane of the industry and illegal to MySpace the trend it clear, we learn about music one on one. Someone has to recommend a band to me. Now I can find them on MySpace listen to the tunes they have posted and decide if I like them. I can order their CD on line at Amazon .com or pick it up at Circuit city when I buy an ink cartridge. I invite the band to be my friend and something new takes place. Bands in the same genre or just bands who hang with my new friends invite me to be friends and I discover more and more music I love and more bands to follow. I have even done random surfing on MySpace looking for odd words like dinosaur and found Hellogoodbye's Zombies Aliens Vampires Dinosaur. Hellogoodbye is a band from California that I really like. Twenty years ago Hellogoodbye would have escaped me unless I ran across them in a club in Orange County. Not today, they are my Mother's Day CD from my sons.