AirPods changed my life. I was previously a user of excellent but somewhat cumbersome Audio Technica over-ears, but Apple’s wireless headphones – dinky in their construction, finicky in their setup, temperamental in their ability to actually work – liberated me from cords. My listening habits are, at best, frustrating for the people around me: when you write about music, you have to listen to the same things over and over, and sometimes those things are very bad. Suddenly I could listen to a terrible new pop record or an ominous drone piece while making breakfast or folding laundry late at night without fear of disturbing my housemates by listening from a speaker. I kept my Audio Technicas but built out my collection of AirPods; now I use the wireless in-ear ones while commuting and also have the over-ear AirPods Max.
For a while, though, I’ve been thinking about moving back to wired earbuds. At some point, doubts about the joyous wireless future I was living in began to creep into my head. I am conspiracy-prone, and started to wonder what all that Bluetooth was doing to my head. I thought about the security issues that come with Bluetooth. And after a fall from a Lime bike on a slippery road, I started thinking about ways to avoid all future falls, one of which was to cycle without listening to music or podcasts.
Most of all, I wondered whether my ability to listen to music constantly was making me value it less. When you have to listen to music occupationally, your standards necessarily get higher – a lot of music really is quite samey – but is my ability to listen on my minute-long walk to check the mail really beneficial, or is it simply turning art into ambient noise? And that is to say nothing of the way wireless headphones seem to turn communal spaces such as cafes and sidewalks into thoroughfares for individuals. These problems theoretically exist for users of wired headphones too, but I can’t say I ever considered headphones antisocial or anti-art until AirPods came along.
I’m clearly not the only one. I see more and more people, especially people around my age, rocking the classic white iPod-associated earbuds instead of the previously ubiquitous AirPods. Celebrities and politicians such as Bella Hadid, Zendaya, Dua Lipa and Kamala Harris use them, as do a lot of musicians I know. When New York magazine published its annual Reasons to Love New York issue last week, it featured stars such as Debbie Harry, Cameron Winter and Subway Takes host Kareem Rahma sharing wired earbuds on the cover, because photographer Hannah la Follette Ryan had noticed more and more people listening to music that way on the subway. You see the same casual intimacy on the tube in London and on buses. The other day I even saw a teenager recreating the ultimate symbol of cool of my youth: two white earbuds dangling from the inside of his collar.
Feel good … Apple’s Gorillaz-soundtracked ad for iPods in 2005.
Although there is undeniably some swaggy retro appeal in wearing wired headphones – especially dinky white ones, which allow Gorillaz-loving zoomers, of whom there are many, to relive the era of the Feel Good Inc-soundtracked iPod ad – I think the return to cords was likely born out of a desire for simplicity and economy. The facts of being young right now – just of being alive right now – are that wages have stagnated as prices have gotten higher and rent has become exorbitant. AirPods cost £99, wired Apple headphones are £17: the moment you lose an AirPod – or, as once happened to me, drop one as you leave a bus and look on in horror as the bus slowly rolls over it – you realise that they are emphatically a luxury product, not the everyday essential they may have seemed when you were using them to tune out a rowdy toddler on said bus. As with streaming, or TikTok, or next-day delivery, luxuries we’ve had access to for only a few years can seem indispensable when there’s actually evidence to suggest the world functioned a whole lot better before we had all these things.
That wired headphones are experiencing a resurgence is heartening – it may be a bellwether for a society ready and willing to slowly divest from all the crutches it uses every day. (I hope ChatGPT is next.) On the other hand, it could mean nothing except that 18-year-olds have just discovered the aura-increasing capabilities of white rubber-coated wire and PVC. Either way, I am ready for our corded future. When I go Christmas shopping this week, I certainly know what Shaad is getting.
