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BETWEEN THE COVERS Looking at two new books that talk of designing the music you like. PRADEEP SEBASTIAN

 I don’t own an iPod. Yet. My friends swear it’s changed the way they listen to music. Their argument: you can be your own DJ. I think I know what they mean.

Long after CDs had arrived, I still made compilation tapes. First, I made these tapes for myself. Put all my favourite songs in several volumes, and then compiled them by genre. Later, I began making such tapes for friends. I just knew what their tastes ran to in music, and often felt a glow of satisfaction when they told me how much they liked what I
had put in.

 And just when I thought I should begin learning how to make CD compilations, the iPod hit the market and began to do exactly that: got everyone to put their favourite songs and
albums by artist or genre or mood. You probably remember the book, High Fidelity? It was a movie too, and it was all about a character who measured his life, especially his love life, in compilation tapes.

Two new books talk of being your own dj in this sense – design the music you like. iPod, Therefore I Am by Dylan Jones and Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield. 

Sheffield, a rock critic for Rolling Stone, titles each chapter of this affecting memoir after song titles from compilation tapes he and his wife had made (tapes for falling asleep, tapes
for dancing, tapes for making out) for each other before her sudden death. Using these mix tapes and the myriad songs in them, he talks of how he tried to live through his loss listening to these tapes all over again. I was tangled up, he notes, in the “noisy, juicy, sparkly life” of Renee. As the chapters - and music tapes - move towards his loss, he writes movingly of losing her: “I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.”

Dylan Jones, author of iPod, Therefore I Am is the British editor of GQ. He is full of praise for Jonathan Ive, iPods’s designer, calling him “nothing less than a deity.” He pays homage to the devise and investigates the quirkier aspects of iPod culture. Jones records his mania for collecting music from every genre (from glam, punk and the wider world of rock) and then shuffling them into his beloved Apple devise. He gets behind the scenes of
the origins of the iPod, from a Steve Jobs concept to an Ive invention. 

The iPod has become beloved to young fans of indie rock and hip-hop to older buffs of jazz and classical music.  Along the way he describes how this tiny gadget has transformed the way we listen to music, making curators, collectors and DJs out of all of us.

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