The Magic iPod is interactive nostalgia for your mid-2000s mashups

2007: the year of the iPhone. Do you ever miss those days, when you had to store your songs as digital files onto a small hard drive with a clickwheel?

Fear not: the Magic iPod is here, offering you tons of opportunities for mid-2000s music mashup nostalgia.

Choose a sample from 20 popular pop and hip-hop songs of the time, and then pair with any of the 23 rock/indie hits, and you suddenly have tons of options for fun and wacky mashups. Bubba Sparxxx and Vanessa Carlton? 50 Cent and Fall Out Boy? Kanye West and Smash Mouth? The combinations are limitless. Or at least, as endless as 2007 was. Which is now over. But hey, this is fun.

Sure, they're all technically pre-made mashups. But there's a thrill in the act of discovery that feels like creativity, and that counts for something.

The Magic iPod was created by a 20-something data analyst slash mashup artist named Race Archibold and was originally released in February 2017. "I personally think this is a tough time for a lot of people, so I was thinking about things that I personally could do that would be nice, and this was a project I'd had in mind for a while," he told The Ringer. "Finally, largely over Christmas and New Year's, I decided to sit down and finally put it together. I figured that this is going to be a site that, if last year is any indication, has the potential to really take off. If so, it would be a good opportunity to do something nice by having people donate to the ACLU instead of dealing with running ads on the site — and also, in that way, I would hope shields it a little bit from any copyright problems I would run into. Really no one aside from the ACLU is financially benefiting from the site. I'm not making any money from it."

3 and a half years later, the site is still up, and it's still succeeding in exactly the way that Archibold had hoped. It's a delightful way to escape from our 2020 reality, even if just for a little while.

The Magic iPod

Meet the Man Behind the Magic iPod [Victor Luckerson / The Ringer]

Image: Pedro Vera / Flickr (CC 2.0)