Kevin D. Hendricks

iPod: DJ in Your Pocket

Once upon a time I Djed a Christian skate night at the local Rolladium. I know, I know, it doesn’t get much cooler than spending your Saturday night going in circles in a roller rink still trying to overcome its 1970s remodeling. Of course spinning hits from dc Talk, Audio Adrenaline, Petra, the Newsboys and Carman certainly ups the hip factor.

Why on earth anyone would want to compound the problem of adolescent awkwardness by strapping eight wheels to their feet is beyond me, but for some reason I did it.

Every weekend my friend Adam and I would leave harassing messages on fellow youth group members’ answering machines (nobody had voice mail in the early 1990s), insisting they come to the Rolladium on M-59 from 6:30-9:00 for Christian skate night. On more than one occasion we would describe the music as “studly,” our preferred term for just about anything.

For a while Adam and I were the Djs, which meant lugging half our CD collections along with us. At the time I hadn’t discovered CD sleeves or booklets, so the jewel cases came along as well. The Rolladium was rather tech-savvy, with an 18-disc CD changer, as well as a couple tape decks and turn tables, which we never used. The 18-disc changer had three six-disc cartridges, so we would put in six discs at a time and cue up six songs, swapping the cartridges out as they finished. We actually had a complicated system for remembering which cartridge we were currently on, which disc, and which track number. Programming the thing was a nightmare, and pushing one wrong button could ruin the whole playlist.

We also took requests, which had to come from our somewhat limited library of Christian CDs. But even if we did have the album, we’d have to fit the song into our programmed set list, usually making us unable to fulfill a request for a solid 30 minutes.

After the Rolladium, I would go on to be an actual radio DJ, spinning Christian hits on my high school’s 10 watt radio station, WBLD 89.3 FM. I would continue the trend in college, on an even smaller station, WBCS 89.7 FM.

Now I have an iPod. Sadly, I don’t have any more DJ responsibilities, but if I did — whoa baby! I currently have over 6,200 songs on my iPod, the equivalent of 16.1 days of music, and it’s just barely half full. All in something the size of a deck of cards. I can only dream of walking into the DJ booth and plugging in an iPod, playing songs from a Playlist and being able to immediately and easily change that playlist. Oh, baby.

I’m a child of the compact disc era — I never had to cue up a vinyl album and tapes were rarely used — but I still drool at the massive phase shift brought on by the iPod.