Mother Download – Facing the Music
The Age, Monday 26 February 2007
My Mum has never been great with computers. It’s funny, because she loves music, and in the era of the digital revolution, she’s a bit of an analog dinosaur.
Mum doesn’t download songs. She doesn’t know how to rip a CD. She would rather knit and listen to her old Stones records than jump online and grab her favourite tracks from iTunes.
The times, they are always a changin’ though, and there was big news in my family at Christmas – Santa gave Mum an iPod. And recently I got the call from her about how to use her new technological contraption.
“Ben”, she said as I dumped a box of CDs in front of the computer. “I want Midnight Oil, Moby and Michael Jackson on there. Oh, and Phil Collins. Can it do that?”
“You can put anything on there,” I replied. “Except Phil Collins. He makes computers and iPods shut down.”
For once when it came to matters of technology, Mum refused to believe me.
She turned out to be a pretty quick learner of all things iPod. She was dragging and dropping songs like a pro. But as we made our way through her favourite tracks, and we reminisced about Peter Garrett’s dance moves and how Michael Jackson used to look, I suddenly realised that Mum and I rarely listen to music together any more.
When I was in primary school, we would spend Sunday afternoons lying on the floor in front of the old stereo, listening to records such as Abby Road, Thriller and early Rolling Stones singles. Sometimes she would tell me about when the Beatles came to Australia. Her own mother was a strict woman and wouldn’t let her see the band when they arrived in Melbourne. Often, I like to imagine Mum back in 1964, the door to her room locked as she listened to the Beatles on an old record player, staring wistfully at record covers and magazines, dying to break out and head down to the old Southern Cross Hotel.
I never had that problem. It was Mum who drove me up to the record store so I could by my first CD – Guns n Roses Use Your Illusion 1. When I didn’t have my own CD player, she had the patience to sit through Metallica’s And Justice For All (again and again) and the droning fuzz of Sonic Youth and Magic Dirt. My school friends couldn’t believe it – I listened to Magic Dirt and Metallica with my mum?
One the one hand, I was stoked that she was getting into her iPod. We had come full circle – all those years ago she introduced me to music, to the subtle art of dropping that needle on to the old spinning vinyl, and now I was guiding her through the baffling steps of digitising songs.
But after we downloaded the last track, and she plugged in her headphones to go for her first iPod walk, I felt sad. The warmth of our musical connection, forged over years of listening to rock n’ roll together in real time and space, seemed to disappear. Sure, Mum is more technologically savvy. She doesn’t need me to download her songs. Somehow, though, I’d rather make more of an effort to drop in and see her for a cuppa, maybe put on a record, and talk about how freaky Michael Jackson looks; and that I’m hanging out for a new You Am I album. Or how she just has to get over that whole Phil Collins thing.