When I bought Sting's Nothing Like the Sun, how was I to know that would be my last album I would buy? When I got an Ipod this past June I surely didn't know it would still be in the packaging come mid-January.
For someone who loves music, why this hesitation? Why not the next step?
In part it's my clinging fondness for vinyl. There are albums in my collection I have never been able to bring myself to replace. The CD version of Welcome to the Pleasure Dome leaves off songs from the original album, and that just ticked me off. First you change the format and then you change the album. Thanks. But the experience was changed even if the original songs remained; they became more sterile. Gone are the snaps and pops that formed part of the soundscapes of Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album. And now with each technological advancement the covers are becoming smaller and even virtual. No more can I have an experience akin to the initial pleasure of seeing and holding the bold pop art of Remain in Light or unfolding The Wall.
Gone also is the experience of standing in an honest-to-God independent record store and discovering at eighteen that there was this sub-culture, this "bohemian" place where people spoke and traded in the language of music--what they were listening to & what they wanted to share with me, who influenced whom & if I like this I'd love that.
Oh, there have been some great used CD stores in my time. One in Knoxville practically saved my life during the year-I-do-no-count when lived in a small East Tennessee town, and taught at a private Baptist school that didn't have "dances" but "foot functions." (Raise your hand if you know why all you Southerners!)
For someone who loves music, why this hesitation? Why not the next step?
In part it's my clinging fondness for vinyl. There are albums in my collection I have never been able to bring myself to replace. The CD version of Welcome to the Pleasure Dome leaves off songs from the original album, and that just ticked me off. First you change the format and then you change the album. Thanks. But the experience was changed even if the original songs remained; they became more sterile. Gone are the snaps and pops that formed part of the soundscapes of Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album. And now with each technological advancement the covers are becoming smaller and even virtual. No more can I have an experience akin to the initial pleasure of seeing and holding the bold pop art of Remain in Light or unfolding The Wall.
Gone also is the experience of standing in an honest-to-God independent record store and discovering at eighteen that there was this sub-culture, this "bohemian" place where people spoke and traded in the language of music--what they were listening to & what they wanted to share with me, who influenced whom & if I like this I'd love that.
Oh, there have been some great used CD stores in my time. One in Knoxville practically saved my life during the year-I-do-no-count when lived in a small East Tennessee town, and taught at a private Baptist school that didn't have "dances" but "foot functions." (Raise your hand if you know why all you Southerners!)
And now there are online message boards, web sites, MP3 files, all these new means of sharing music. Now the musical world can be my oyster, as Frankie say. But the brick-and-mortar independent record store, the one that most mid-size and even some small towns had is the place that I miss. Now I have to travel to far places for a good (or any) record store, and vinyl aficionados have become their own elite club (thus warranting the label "aficionados") and as I said I don't even own a turntable anymore, so my nostalgia is really not for the store, or the vinyl, it's for that time in my life when my music and my lifestyle were inextricably intertwined.
I thought all these feelings were because I was tired of learning yet another new technology and having yet another music collection become obsolete.
But it signals something more, I realized today. A concert I want to see is this coming Tuesday night in a city over 2-hours away. I have to be at work the next day at 8AM. Time was the lies I'd have to tell, the sleep I'd have to miss, came easily. Now? I'm afraid this coming Tuesday evening Mr. Manson will be short at least one office drone hoping to recapture her feeling of being eighteen, twenty, or even twenty-five, immersed in the tribal abandonment of yelling lyrics that for at least two-hours are truth.
With that off my chest, maybe now I can open that iPod and that big heavy box, and find myself a turntable.
I thought all these feelings were because I was tired of learning yet another new technology and having yet another music collection become obsolete.
But it signals something more, I realized today. A concert I want to see is this coming Tuesday night in a city over 2-hours away. I have to be at work the next day at 8AM. Time was the lies I'd have to tell, the sleep I'd have to miss, came easily. Now? I'm afraid this coming Tuesday evening Mr. Manson will be short at least one office drone hoping to recapture her feeling of being eighteen, twenty, or even twenty-five, immersed in the tribal abandonment of yelling lyrics that for at least two-hours are truth.
With that off my chest, maybe now I can open that iPod and that big heavy box, and find myself a turntable.
2 comments:
I just updated my iPhone tonight. It now has the ability to pinpoint my location from outer space.
I knew it! Steve Jobs is Big Brother!
Post a Comment