My iTunes-Listening Manifesto Repost
It's the eve of Christ's birth and I thought I'd repost my 'iTunes-Listening Manifesto', the comments originally made on it can be found "here":http://mog.com/Josh_Haden/blog_post/13790#comments.First of all, I'd like to say I'm inspired to write this by mogger dbboucher (http://mog.com/dbboucher) who has given me a lot of great ideas about how to listen to music on my iTunes. The system I use is very effective for my purposes and I thought I'd share it with anybody who visits my MOG page and wonders what the hell all that crazy music I listen to is, and why music by certain artists will never be in my iTunes.As a preamble I need to say that I believe in God, that is, I believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, eternal force or entity that created everything seen and unseen, has no beginning or end, and cannot be adequately described by language. Since to me God on the condition of being God already knows everything we will do in the future, I don't believe we have free will. So, for example, I believe that we have no choice in the music we listen to; we only listen to music that God wants us to hear.When I first got iTunes around four years ago I faced an immediate dilemma. Like most people I had way too much music and not enough computer memory to fit it all in. So I had to pick and choose which artists and songs I could add. I decided as a start I would only add music that had some kind of religious or spiritual significance for me that could inspire me throughout the day. So then I started thinking, why do I have any music at all in my collection that doesn't inspire me? Why waste my time with music that doesn't help to bring me to a deeper understanding of life? So I gathered up all the crap music in my collection, brought it all to my local good independent record store and traded it for music from around the world that brings religious or spiritual meaning to people's lives. So now on my iTunes I have everything from Aleister Crowley to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, music of Akom practitioners to Japanese Shinto music, Gregorian Chant to Australian Aboriginal music, Reggae to Christian Psychedelic, Praise music to Persian classical music, stripper music to spoken word by self-help gurus, and the list goes on.What I do is before I add a new song to my iTunes, I input what genre it is (this is sometimes difficult to decide), and then in the 'grouping' section I type 'religious'. The song automatically is added to a smart playlist I created called (you guessed it) 'religious' that only contains songs that have 'religious' listed in the 'grouping' section. Then, and most importantly, when I listen to my 'religious' smart playlist I have the 'shuffle' function turned on. This allows God, or the 'random' algorithim that in my opinion is the result of God's will, to choose what songs I listen to at any given time. (Its true that I rarely listen to a song by clicking on it, or listen to an album all the way through. I'll add an album to iTunes and sometimes it will be months before I can even hear one song from it.)This means of course a lot of music that may be perfectly fine will never make it onto my iTunes. Its just that I simply refuse to listen to any music that was created with the sole intention of placating the masses or making money. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with placating the masses or making money, I just think music should be made to enlighten people and to bring people to a more evolved state of being, not turn them into sheep or limit their abilities to discover that there's more to the world than that which we can see or touch.Anyways, for what its worth, that's how I use my iTunes, and I'm sticking to it. Any thoughts, comments, or suggestions?
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