Tuesday, August 31, 2021
bring your record player and your raincoats 45s
bring your record player and your raincoats 45s
I'm moving. It's the first time I've done it in close to a decade and a half.
Last time around I hauled most of my CDs here and I had far less records. This time around, the records are gonna be a real pain in the ass to move, but I also decided to get rid of the CDs.
I've always been more of a pack rat than a Marie Kondo disciple, but tossing clothes that don't fit or are long past their prime (anyone need a thrifted dress shirt screen printed by long defunct band post-hardcore band Your Enemies' Friends?) was still a lot easier than getting rid of these fucking CDs.
It's not like I even have any way to play them right now. I'm two desktops past the last one that had a drive and the CD player I got in 2001 finally decided to kick the bucket a few years ago, replaced by a series of Amazon Echoes that can fire up Spotify even when my hands are wrist deep in dish water or when I'm just too lazy to get up off of the couch.
But man, they were still hard to get rid of.
I could remember exactly when I bought some of them. And if I couldn't remember the precise time, there were so many that were acquired following roughly the same sequence of events: saving up what little expendable income I had, taking a couple buses for an hour or more (each way) from Richmond to downtown, and eagerly handing over a wad of cash to Scratch or Zulu or A&B Sound or Virgin Megastore.
I traded in a box full at Red Cat, who were exceptionally generous considering CDs are relatively worthless now, save for a few extremely rare ones (anyone wanna buy Colin Meloy Sings Morrissey?). And it was weird to feel excited to get anything, but at the same time thinking about not only how much money I spent on all those little plastic circles, but how much value they had to me at one time.
And it was nice to just look through them and listen--on Spotify or iTunes--to some records I hadn't thought of in ages.
I posted an Instagram story a week or so ago with the above photo and a mostly joking "anyone need 400 CDs?" And I have to say, I was shocked when my friend David (who you might remember as the proprietor of Zoo Zhop, RIP) sent me a message to say he'd "happily take all of them."
I was pretty happy that they'd be saved from a landfill (or recycling--can you even recycle CDs?), but I was even happier once I drove them over to him and we spent an hour or so throwing some on and talking about bands we remembered and bands we'd forgotten
Having the vast majority of modern music at your fingertips is surely superior in almost every way to having to acquire songs via physical media, but the flip side is that if all I have is my brain thinking of what I might want to listen to, there's so much I forget versus being able comb through a stack of albums.
I think it was maybe an old Chart article, but I've had a quote buried on my Facebook profile that really sums up how fleeting (for that writer) mp3s were. And that's even more pronounced in the streaming era:
“I mourn all the songs deleted from hard drives over the last ten years that would have been tolerated and eventually, perhaps, fallen in love with if they were on cassettes or LPs or CDs”
I'd go on to say that, even if you were in love with those songs already, having them kicking around in physical form means you might fall in love with them again too.
now playing: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth
