My first album was actually two albums. Green Day’s Dookie, and The Offspring’s Smash. Since my mother bought me those first CDs at CD World, my music collection has grown substantially, and in a variety of formats. I have CDs, MP3s, and even the records referenced in the title. This music charts many many stages of my life, from my start listening to mid 90s top 40, to my Celtic Punk phase, to my current indie music obsession. It is obviously very personal and important to me, thus my starting a music blog. But I Think in the new Digital Age I need to justify having one at all.
This is a subject covered by most music enthusiasts and critics at some point, and I think the mixed quality and ubiquitous defensiveness is telling. The recording industry is in serious trouble, and this trouble is based on their inability to quickly adapt to the changing formats through which we consume music. The funny thing about this is that they themselves sparked the format shift. One feature of high capitalism is that marketing will tell us we need a new piece of technology to replace something that already does its job. So with the CD and the record, and for over a decade the record industry made a killing as everyone replaced their records with new, shiny CDs. Just as this cash cow dried up, MP3s came along and blew the whole thing up in their face. Since CDs were a digital format, it is as easy as sneezing to rip CDs to MP3s, and the Great Downloading Wars began.
MP3s have all the advantages of accessibility and convenience and are essentially free. So why do I continue to collect albums? Critics have discussed things like the “album” continuing to be a valid medium because it creates digestible chunks of music. I think this is a valid argument but it only hints at a deeper issue. We all learned to consume music in a specific way, and the format is key to that method. When I buy a cd, I take it home, rip open the package and put it on. While I listen to it for the first time, I peruse the album art, and try to glean information about the songs and the artists. I am sure teenagers of today listen to MP3s whilst on the internet, one tab on Wikipedia and another on a lyrics page. I have not yet adapted fully to the digital age, and so I am going to need my physical representation of my media for some time to come. So that is one aspect.
At a more basic level, however, music has long represented a quest for authenticity for me. When I first began listening to music it was because all my friends did it. It was clear that they knew something that I didn’t, and so I started listening to popular music seriously, attempting to deduce what. It became clear that the music of the time, the aforementioned Green Day and Offspring, The Smashing Pumpkins, and the litany of post grunge bands, had some pretty heavy philosophical insights to convey to little suburban me. As I became more emotionally invested in the music I found that some music was clearly bad and some good, and as I searched for more good music I would try to find connections and influences. I learned about the great musical movements of the past, but found they meant nothing if I did not delve into them, actually listen to the music, and connect it all chronologically. And all the time was the search within the music for some truth that would help me understand life, reality, and the secret of everything.
I am sure it is open to question as to whether there is anything to find in music approaching such a goal. Philosophers of old looked down upon song as a method of delivering philosophical insight, as the emotional punch of the backing music has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with manipulation of cultural norms and artistic expectations. Nonetheless, my project of trying to find everything good in music continues, complicated my discovery that the record industry is evil and most of the good stuff will never be popular.
I have made several attempts to organize the chaos of my musical collection. These attempts have thus far been failures because of my generally scatterbrained and lazy ADD addled self. My lifestyle also played a part. Living between the houses of divorced parents, my CDs had to be in carrying cases if I wanted them with me. Once I left for college it continued to be convenient to store this way, since every year I had to move. I have been living in a somewhat stable fashion, however, for three years with a wonderful woman who happens to be clinically OCD and as patient as the day is long. After several years of looking on with quiet desperation at the creeping horror that was my CD collection, she suggested a method of organization that suddenly made sense. I purchased a large number of CD boxes, each of which will hold around 30 jewel cases (if you put them in a book it ruins the experience!), and has a label incorporated into the front. I can mark this label with a letter of the alphabet, allowing for the flexible storage of the CDs on shelves or in boxes that will maintain the alphabetization. Also, as I now have access to an MP3 player, I can rip the CDs and not mess with the physical copy unless I have leisure time to enjoy the liner art, which helps maintain the organization. This process revealed a rather major flaw in my CD collection. Namely, that in any 30 CD selections I have probably not listened to 8-10 of the CDs.
There are two reasons for this. First is that my relatives know I like CDs and, despite a yearly assurance that I have a wish list available, I keep receiving boxes of random CDs. The second reason is that I tend to buy CDs…at random. There are a number of fine establishments in this country of ours that sell used CDs very cheaply, and cheapest of these is the Princeton Record Exchange, which sells CDs for as low as $1.99. In high school my friends and I began a practice of driving down and buying $20.00 of CDs maybe once a month. Half the CDs might be by people we had heard of, but the other half would often be people who just had snappy names, or looked good, or had hot chicks on the front. We developed elaborate rituals for this experience, including the fact that you had to listen to two tracks of the artists the driver knew least well on the ride home, and then move on the front passenger’s least known purchase, and so on. This was such a successful practice that I stopped listening to the radio even before the rise of the MP3 player. I could always find out about an artist that was new to me by driving down to Princeton. The downside, as I am sure you might guess, is that once you get home many of the CDs that have not been listened to become enigmas that never enter regular rotation. Even CDs that are listened to may be overshadowed by other, better CDs and forgotten for the time being.
So my project, and the point of this blog: now that my CDs are organized in boxes, I have blanked my MP3 player, and am systematically moving, box by box, and ripping all the CDs I don’t know if I want to keep. I then listen to them at work, review them, and decide if I want to keep them. I have decided to let myself have one revisit per album before I move on. That is the plan, lets see how it goes.
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