Turn the radio up, for that sweet sound (but for the love of God turn the iPod down)

Pete Townshend Warns iPod Users About Hearing Loss
By The Associated Press, Jan 4, 2006 06:44 PM

LONDON – Guitarist Pete Townshend has warned iPod users that they could end up with hearing problems as bad as his own if they don’t turn down the volume of the music they are listening to on earphones.

Townshend, 60, guitarist in the 60s band The Who, said his hearing was irreversibly damaged by years of using studio headphones and that he now is forced to take 36-hour breaks between recording sessions to allow his ears to recover.

“I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal components deaf,” he said on his Web site.
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I’m not sayin’ Townshend is not right and wise, but all the great rebels are, well . . . getting old. Seen the new Kaiser healthcare commercial with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”? For some reason it is a little depressing.

Someday, decades from here, I am going to hear Nirvana’s “Lithium” in a retirement-home commercial, or Ed Vedder’s scream selling denture cream. And then I will go in the bathroom and cry (well, not really, but come on). It seems like the odd and slightly melancholy thing about being young and rebellious is that eventually you become old and safe.