The premise...

Welcome to the iPod Tarot!

The premise of this site is simple. Everyone's been talking for ages about the fact that mp3 players have revolutionize HOW people listen to music by allowing anybody to carry The Soundtrack To Your Life in a pocket. It seemed to me (like to so many people) that my iPod had an eerie ability to pull tunes out of the blue that corresponded exactly to the current mood or had some strange relevance to the situation at hand. And out of a playlist of...6000 songs??

This brought to mind an old sci-fi book by Tom Deitz:

In the novel, the main character can predict the future by listening to an oldies radio station and interpreting the songs that come up. Recall that this was written in the early 1990s, before iPods were anything more than a kooky Cupertino Codeword. My friend Stephe Teather brought up the whole songs-as-oracles concept while watching me read from my Aquarian Tarot deck years ago. The concept came up again recently when another friend, Les Blackwell, began to get the sneaking suspicion that my iPod was reading his thoughts; he had mentioned that the first album he ever bought was Ghostbusters and, within minutes, the Ghostbusters theme song came on over the speakers! (And this is out of a library of 6000+ songs on full random...). Furthermore, the machine appears to "know" that Les gets the twitches from Tori Amos, as it seems to play a disproportionate amount of her music whenever he's around, just to make him crazy.

So I figured, if my iPod is actually psychic/possessed anyways, why not formalize the notion by making a "Tarot Playlist"? Now...plenty of people have tried a similar shtick by trying to do readings off of the Full Random output of their mp3 player; try to Google the words "iPod Tarot" and, apart from this site, you'll get dozens of playlists that insert song titles into the various slots of the Celtic Cross and come up with an interpretation. My take on using the iPod as a tarot deck is a little bit different. Rather than trying to free-associate meanings from a large list of songs, I'm going to try to create for myself a predetermined list of songs that I've already linked back to the original meanings of the 78 cards in a standard tarot deck and then see how we do using that limited set to predict the future.

Are you with me? Here goes!