"MP3's are perfect"
About this Quote
"MP3's are perfect" lands like a dare tossed into an argument that never really ends: fidelity versus freedom, aura versus access. Coming from Kristin Hersh, a musician whose work has always prized emotional voltage over polish, the line reads less as tech cheerleading and more as a statement of values. "Perfect" isn’t a lab-grade claim about audio quality; it’s a provocation about what music is for.
The apostrophe-s plural alone hints at a certain shrug toward gatekeeping. MP3s are the scrappy, slightly degraded vessel that let songs travel - fast, cheap, promiscuously. In Hersh’s world, that matters. Her writing and performances tend to foreground intimacy: a voice close to your ear, a lyric that feels like a confession you weren’t meant to overhear. MP3 culture, especially in its peak era, matched that intimacy by making music portable, private, and immediate. The subtext is democratic: if a song needs a $5,000 setup to "work", maybe it doesn’t work.
There’s also an implicit critique of nostalgia. Audiophile discourse often performs taste by demanding the "right" format, the "right" equipment, the "right" ritual. Hersh’s punchy certainty cuts through that performance. MP3s are "perfect" because they reflect how people actually live with music: in motion, on imperfect speakers, amid noise, repeated until the file’s metadata feels like a diary entry.
It’s a small sentence with a big ethos: art that survives compression is art that can survive anything.
The apostrophe-s plural alone hints at a certain shrug toward gatekeeping. MP3s are the scrappy, slightly degraded vessel that let songs travel - fast, cheap, promiscuously. In Hersh’s world, that matters. Her writing and performances tend to foreground intimacy: a voice close to your ear, a lyric that feels like a confession you weren’t meant to overhear. MP3 culture, especially in its peak era, matched that intimacy by making music portable, private, and immediate. The subtext is democratic: if a song needs a $5,000 setup to "work", maybe it doesn’t work.
There’s also an implicit critique of nostalgia. Audiophile discourse often performs taste by demanding the "right" format, the "right" equipment, the "right" ritual. Hersh’s punchy certainty cuts through that performance. MP3s are "perfect" because they reflect how people actually live with music: in motion, on imperfect speakers, amid noise, repeated until the file’s metadata feels like a diary entry.
It’s a small sentence with a big ethos: art that survives compression is art that can survive anything.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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