Requiem for the compact disc
They’re still around in large numbers and for many uses, and recording artists still put their albums out in this format, but we know that the days of the CD are numbered. If you want your new music right now, this very minute, you don’t run to the nearest CD store — it might not be there yet — you download it off the Internet. Recently the last Virgin Megastore in America closed its doors forever. When I heard the news I felt sad not just because I wasn’t in New York to buy discount discs but because it marked the passing of an age. A very short age.
Kids, here’s a short tech history lesson. Our grandparents listened to music on 78 rpm records made of thin, fragile shellac — the same material found in hairsprays. These were succeeded by 33 rpm records — what we called “long-playing” or LPs — and 45 rpm “singles” made of more durable vinyl. They weren’t that durable: if you dropped them they broke, and if you scratched them the phonograph needle would get stuck in the little groove. The music recorded in the area of the scratch would repeat itself — that’s probably how DJs got the idea. When we were kids one of our great joys in life was to play 33 rpm records at 45 rpm. It made everyone sound like The Chipmunks (a popular novelty act allegedly composed of rodent-like mammals which sounded like children on helium).
I’ve always been a great believer in carrying one’s music library around. I will not stand for having my airspace violated by music I hate. Yes, I’m the weirdo who gags, winces and covers her ears in restaurants, and asks the waiters to change the music or turn it off.
If someone asked me to turn off my music I would, but so far no one has tried it. (My glasses are terrifying.) In elementary school I sometimes brought a phonograph to class with a stack of disco-era singles. It was cumbersome to say the least — my schoolbag itself was so heavy it required a trolley — but you can’t argue with a 10-year-old.
By the time I was old enough to buy my own music, everything was available on audiocassette. So I occasionally lugged a small boom box to school. Fortunately the Walkman came out when I was in high school so I had a lot less to carry. However, the audiocassettes themselves were often troublesome. The tape was always getting tangled up so you’d have to unspool it, unravel the snarl, then wind the tape back into the plastic case using a pencil. This could take literally hours.
The first compact disc player I ever saw was in the Mickey Rourke movie, 9 1/2 Weeks. That was in the late Eighties. I said, Ha! Those things will never catch on, people won’t want to reassemble their entire music collections in a new format. Not to mention that CD players were expensive. For the next decade I was happy with my Walkman and my tape deck at home. I’ve never been much of an early adopter; I believe in using equipment until it wears out and is completely beyond repair.
It wasn’t until ’97 that I finally got myself a CD player, and it was Elvis Costello’s fault. Someone gave me a copy of “Painted From Memory,” the album he did with Burt Bacharach. I gave in and bought a Discman, and as my CD collection grew I got myself a bigger CD player.
At the time I was doing a Sunday afternoon radio talk show. After the radio show I would go to Tower Records in Glorietta, prowl among the shelves, and read album liner notes. My one musical talent was finding CDs that had been marked down because oddly enough no one was buying them: Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Lloyd Cole, John Lurie, plenty of jazz. I miss flipping through the racks of environmentally-unfriendly plastic jewel boxes and looking at the cover art. It was fun finding albums you wouldn’t be caught dead with, holding them up and loudly telling your friends, “Oh look, it’s the Four Non-Blondes CD with that song your band was born to cover.”
I even miss waiting to use the CD player that was always being hogged by some guy who was singing along off-key to a stack of albums you knew he wasn’t going to buy. The store had a pretty good classical music section in the basement and a decent jazz section on the second floor with lots of Chet Baker.
Every time I went on a trip, I would visit a Tower Records or FNAC or Virgin Megastore or HMV and do the same things.
There is infinitely more music on the net today. You can read the album notes, visit the artists’ websites, and hear samples of the music. But you can’t hold the albums in your hands. You can’t be among other people listening to music, judging them according to their musical tastes, and getting a kick when you realize that other people like the music you consider yours exclusively.
Ah, well. Progress.
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