When I was just a little tyke, it was vinyl. By the time I started buying music, really great stuff like Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet," it was all about cassette tapes. When I started getting serious, it was CDs that I built my collection with. So it's not as if I didn't expect the medium in which my music is delivered to change again, but I'm really having a hard time getting down with this digital thing - and it has nothing to do with music.
For one thing, I really like the trip to the record store. It's a great, ritualistic experience. Even if it's just a chance to feel superior to the douche bag behind the counter, it's a social experience. It's like going to a restaurant - sometimes I just need some food, but other times I'm really going out so I can just hang out at a table for an hour or so. Some people have a Sunday service - I have restaurants and record stores.
Like most guys I know, I also have a bizarre fascination with cataloguing. There's a sense of pride in looking at a wall of CDs or vinyl and knowing that it represents your superior taste and value as a human being. But when I download music, I just don't feel I "own it" in the same way I do when it's taking up shelf space.
And on a related note, how are we to survive without cover art? The music purist in me would say that digital-only music allows us to judge each cut solely on its own merits, but I've long since learned to silence the music purist in me. The truth is, we all benefit from the short-hand of cover art. If you see a cover with gothic lettering over a drawing of a blazing hell beast, you know it's probably not a lesbian folk group. Popular music has had a strong visual component for years, and I'm not ready to break that chain.
But, lament as I may, I know the end of tangible albums is near. And it's not just that, friends. We are becoming relics of the mechanical world in the new digital world. I may not be able to build or repair a tape deck, but I have a pretty good understanding of how it works. A CD player uses a f***ing laser. When I was a kid, lasers were only used by evil masterminds trying to take over the world (including Reagan). I have even less understanding of how a digital music file works. Yeah, it's a lot of 1s and 0s that my computer turns into music, but if the song doesn't play I can't exactly look under the hood.
I'll see you all in twenty years, crouching in the bowels of the last record stores, lamenting the death of rock n' roll and just learning how to work our Ipods.
1 comment:
Amen, my friend. As you know, I've all but given up on CDs because they're cheap pieces of crap, relics of an age of disposable culture, to be used only if a vinyl copy does not exist or is impossible to find w/o taking out a 2nd mortgage. I'm not even going to get into the supposed superiority of digital sound. But, I will say this for downloadable music -- it has it's place as the new single. Until the 50s, albums were actually ALBUMS -- books of 78 rpm records, each with 2 songs. Most of those had a picture on the cover, but not all. Most people were still buying records one at a time, anyway -- albums were kind of like the greatest hits sets of that era. The LP didn't come along until the 50s, and with it the now conventional format of a group of songs packaged with artwork. In pop music (and that includes most rock), 45 rpm singles were still outselling LPs into the 70s (I think...it could be late-60s) and usually only first pressings or special editions had photo covers. It wasn't until cassette singles that artwork really became standard -- and even then it was often just a repackaging of the album cover art. So, having no artwork to go with a single is not really anything new. In fact, it's kind of a return to the way things were for the first half-century of recorded music. But that still doesn't mean downloaded music doesn't suck. What it really means is that downloading entire albums REALLY sucks.
--Ed
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