He's up to his ears in iPod

iPod, Therefore I Am: Thinking Inside the White Box
By Dylan Jones
Bloomsbury, 207 pp., paperback, $14.95

Dylan Jones is a man in love. Inspired by the intensity of his passion, his stomach twirling with butterflies, Jones has penned a mash note to his beloved, an ode to all the myriad ways in which she has changed his life irrevocably. ''The feelings I have toward my iPod . . . toward the Pod's iconic white headphones, toward everything associated with it are almost unnatural." Jones goes on to describe his iPod as ''like some sort of sex toy," and notes that Apple honcho Steve Jobs knows a product is good if he wants to lick it. Clearly, Jones adores his iPod. OK, so this might be a bit unusual as far as love affairs go, but Jones is nothing if not persistent in his affections. His love letter, which he's titled ''iPod, Therefore I Am," is part ''High Fidelity"-esque music memoir, part cultural history, and part how-to guide to musical scavenging, but it's all compelling, if more than a little kooky.

Alternating personal chapters with those that are Apple-related, Jones dishes out two stories: first, how Jobs and designer extraordinaire Jonathan Ive helped take their company from digital-music laggards to heroes, and second, the story of a teenager's immersion in music as a shy adolescent, his life as a music fan, and the iPod's reawakening of his record obsession. The former is assured but a bit lacking in critical perspective. In Jones's telling, Jobs and Ive are geniuses, and can do no wrong. This is all well and good, but it leaves him with little to do other than smooth the folds of his ''I [HEART] STEVE JOBS" T-shirt and polish the duo's Geek Hall of Fame plaques. These sections read like extended product ads, and when Jones takes to ruminating on Apple's logo as symbolic of their mythical status, you know he has drunk a bit too deeply of the company Kool-Aid.

Jones is on much firmer ground in the personal chapters, where his gee-whiz enthusiasm for iTunes and the iPod, like a little kid let loose in a digital candy store, pushes him to flip through his own back pages. Growing up a quiet kid with a painful stammer, Jones found refuge in his records, especially those of '70s glam-rock icons like David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, and Roxy Music. ''I studied every nuance, every crackle, every scratch," Jones says of his singles collection, and his musical obsession was only further inflamed by the punk revolution, whose waves broke hard over middle-class English teenagers like himself. Music never strayed far from the center of Jones's life (his day job is editor of British GQ) but lacked some of the intense devotion of earlier days, until the arrival of the iPod, ''like a cigarette pack in cocaine white," in case the numerous references to its addictive properties failed to register.

Jones is a middle-brow aesthete, boldly favoring Blur over Oasis, and going out on a limb to proclaim his late conversion to the joys of jazz. Having spent so much time considering the topic (he gives himself the oft-appropriate nickname the ''iBore"), Jones is spot-on about the nature of the i-listening experience, and the ways in which Apple's musical revolution has changed how fans experience music. In his equation, the iPod and iTunes have effected a democratization of all music, allowing listeners to return to simply hearing the music, with no additives or preservatives. While the iPod is guilty of leaching music of its context, removing songs from their rightful places within albums and musical traditions, it also is a great leveler. With the iPod, or any MP3 player, it becomes simply impossible to fake enthusiasm for poor songs, or overrated artists. It has also allowed self-professed music snobs to stop worrying and love trashy music on its own bubble-gum merits.

The elephant in the room that Jones doesn't address, perhaps afraid that Jobs will revoke his charter membership in his fan club, is the specter of brown-market downloading, and the enormous extent to which Kazaa, Napster, and others have also played their parts in revolutionizing contemporary music consumption. These quasi-illegal peer-to-peer sites have, in addition to leaving the record industry quaking in its boots, busted open the gates of music past and present to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, making everyone a music historian.

Jones gives Apple credit where it is due, noting that where the major record labels have uniformly dropped the ball on the digital-music upheaval, choosing to fight 'em rather than join 'em, Apple has embraced the new technology wholeheartedly. A hefty dollop of Apple's phenomenal customer loyalty is due to Apple's seeming to be a corporation that understands, and caters to, the needs of its consumers. Having a designer like Ive on board was a coup of epic proportions as well. As anyone who has spent time gazing around at their fellow passengers on a commuter train, or fellow pedestrians on urban sidewalks, can attest, the iPod represents the height of consumption as stylistic choice. There is a certain pride, in these individuals' minds, in being able to say, ''I'm an iPod owner."

Since its introduction in November 2001, the iPod has maintained its place as one of the most beloved pieces of technology available to the American consumer. There are many lessons that can be drawn from this fact, about design's ever-growing place in the commercial landscape, and about Americans' unceasing lust for the newest and coolest gadgets.

Jones chooses to accentuate the iPod's functionality, and its ability to act as a wayback machine rejuvenating the overfamiliar thickets of the musical landscape: ''The iPod has given me back the ability to obsess over records in the way I did when I was a teenager." Come to think of it, the iPod has done that for a whole slew of people (myself included). Now where do I get one of those ''I [HEART] STEVE JOBS" shirts?

Saul Austerlitz is a writer living in New York City. He is currently at work on a history of music videos.