My Gay iPod

There was an article in the Good Weekend recently about the Apple iPods celebrated shuffle function. This little command supposedly lets your iPod shuffle your vast collection of tunes and then play them at random, just like a giant jukebox. The article in the GW questioned just how random, random is as his iPod seemed to have a prediliction to some artists and tunes and a complete horror of others.

My iPod I am convinced is a 50 something gay man. I have over 2000 songs in there and a fair mix of the retro, new, cool, almost cool, daggy and plain embarassing. What does my iPod go for everytime, the campest, daggiest tunes it can dig up. Never has it ever played say, my Green Day or Radiohead albums, it says no to my indie alt country stuff by The Waifs, The Audreys and Lucinda Williams. It shakes its head at Jet, Powderfinger and Shane Nicholson.

What do I get on my shuffle? Time and time again? Dolly Parton - always. Kylie Minogue - always, Olivia Newton John circa the Xanadu era - always. I'm embarassed to admit that I have a few Elton John songs on there but my iPod isn't - he rolls them out with a frightening regularity that defies the notion of random as there are only 4 Elton tunes on there amongst the 2000 songs I have. Yet If it's true that my iPod is a older gay man I guess I should be grateful that I don't have any showtunes on there, I'd be bludgeoned to death with songs from Oklahoma and the Sound of Music.