Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: The Musical Future

Years ago, I had a conversation with my son about my record collection, and he couldn’t believe that we used to put records in crates that were heavy and bulky, and actually took them with us to parties. I remember holding up my iPod – which was big and bulky by today’s standards – and telling him that I could hold more music in this little thing than I could fit in my entire apartment on vinyl when I was in college. I may as well have told him how great it was that we didn’t have to worry about Indian attacks in our house, he was so unimpressed.

And why would he have been impressed? He’s grown up in The Future. My kids have never seen a floppy disc, heard the sound of a modem connecting, blown into a NES cartridge in the futile hope of making it work, or looked up an address in a Thomas Guide. I have experienced all of these things, and though I’m grateful that I don’t have to deal with them in any meaningful way now, unless I want to, it’s odd to me that, at just 36 years-old, I straddle this tremendous and significant technological rubicon, while my children can barely see it in on the distant horizon behind them, as they speed away on their jet packs and rocket bikes. I mean, they hardly remember cassettes, let alone cassingles, and occasionally I will consider this fact and quietly weep for them, alone, while they play Call of Duty against some stranger on the other side of the world in real time.

This memory came to me over the weekend, when I commented on Twitter that I loved side two of Abbey Road. Mentioning “side two” of a record made me realize that my kids have grown up in a world where records are as relevant to them as Kodak Disc cameras…or being afraid of the bubonic plague. If I close my eyes, I can see the apple on Abbey Road’s label spinning on my parents’ turntable, and know that side two begins with "Here Comes The Sun" from personal memory. The only apple my kids will see if they listen to the Beatles now is the one on the front of the computer, and if they didn’t have me holding up my Sansabelt slacks and filling their heads with musical trivia whenever they can’t outrun me, the only way they’d know where side two started was if they visited Wikipedia on a lark. You know, to examine ancient history, for fun.

But, ever mindful of what the world was like when I knew the pops and skips in my records as well as I knew the lyrics, and recalling a time when I listened to them through giant headphones connected to the turntable by a 20 foot long coiled black cord, I’m grateful that the album spins in my memory while a digital copy that will never degrade currently plays in iTunes, streaming wirelessly via Airtunes to a set of small speakers behind me in my office. While I don’t need to look up the track listing on Wikipedia to know how the record was originally heard, having access to the most extensive collection of liner notes in history just a few clicks away makes my inner music geek squeal with excitement, then quickly look around and make sure nobody saw him break his carefully-crafted facade of cool disinterest.

For example: Toward the end of [the album], immediately prior to [the] "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" line played over piano chords, are eighteen bars or measures of guitar solo: the first two bars are played by Paul McCartney, the second two by George Harrison, and the third two by John Lennon, then the sequence repeats. Each had a distinctive style which McCartney felt reflected their personalities: McCartney's playing included string bends similar to his lead guitar work on "Another Girl" from the Help! album; Harrison's was melodic with slides yet technically advanced and Lennon's was rhythmic, stinging and had the heaviest distortion. Immediately after Lennon's third solo, the piano chords of the final line "And in the end...." begins.

I’ve been listening to Abbey Road as long as I can remember, and I didn’t know any of that until just a few hours ago. Damn, living in the future is so cool!

Just don’t tell my kids, because they won’t believe you.


Wil Wheaton lives in the future, is from the future, and has come back from the future to warn you about


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