Nostalgia, as a lot of people have said, is a hell of a drug.
This post could be about a number of things, it could be about the way we deal with memory, about how artefacts can bring moments back to us instantly and vividly. It could be about how I'm a lazy swine who never got round to binning stuff which should have been got rid of a long time ago, or it could be about how I, as a middle aged man, am in danger of spending too much time in the past when there's a perfectly good present to be getting on with. It could, viewed in a certain light, be about the power of music to transcend time and space.
It could be about a lot of things, it depends which end you're looking at it from, I suppose.
I'll explain: a few weeks ago, on something of a whim (though it's a thought that I instantly recognised as having been buzzing round the back of my head for a while), I bought a CD player (with, would you believe, a tape deck). I had known, of course, that I didn't have one anymore, the last CD player in the house having been trashed some years before by one of the kids, but I hadn't felt the loss. In this golden technological age of smart toasters, tellies that answer back and a recording device in every room I'd gotten out of the habit, when anything I might want to listen to is instantly available, it's very easy to drift away from the physical act of putting a record on.
I'd been meaning to get one for a while, though without thinking to in any meaningful way; due partly to having a fairly ludicrous amount of CDs that I never quite got round to boxing up and putting away, or selling for a pittance, but also due to a vague realisation that I actually wanted more. I blame Richard Dawson and Anna Meredith, artists who, for the first time in a while I found myself actually wanting to own the records by, the actual physical artefact, just streaming seemed somehow disrespectful. If, on the off chance, either popped round for a cup of tea I wanted to be able to brandish a record and say look, I paid actual money for an actual record. You got actual royalties.
(in the interests of full disclosure I didn't pay a bean, they were bought for me as presents, but the principle still stands)
(and no, I'm not going to wax rhapsodic about them here, neither are particularly approachable and I don't want to get angry replies from people saying they bought them and it was just a bloke shouting and some noisy instrumentals, to each their own, dear reader, but I do bloody love them)
I've always been a little uneasy about the digital age of music. I know that piracy is as old as the industry itself but at least when you taped an album, or, even more giddily, burned it to CD, there was a fairly reasonable chance that someone not too far up the chain had actually paid for the original record. I went along with the lies everyone told themselves for a bit, about the music industry's model being broken, about using filesharing to discover new artists that you'd then buy records by, but gradually settled on the old fashioned conclusion that it was, pretty much, theft (It's probably not a coincidence that this was a view that solidified round about the time I published my first book and thought no, I'd quite like to get the money, thanks). The new age of streaming seems largely to be an excuse for massive tech platforms to avoid actually paying acts much money, which is not a business model which seems overly fair from where I'm sitting.
Ah yes, this post could also be about the out of touch middle aged bloke who bemoans the loss of the world of his youth and froths impotently against the travails of the modern age. Could be that, depends on your point of view. In my defence I cheerfully download stuff (for which I pay money, I think we've covered this bit already), and the internet's ability to bring artists to my ears I might not otherwise have heard of is something I cherish and am regularly astonished by. So on balance, I think not. Go ahead and feel free to think it though, if it gets you through the day.
Right, now we've got all that out of the way, back to the CD player, picked up on the spur of the moment for nine quid in a charity shop. With a tape deck.
Tapes? You cry. Who in the name of all that's holy still has tapes?
Me. That's who. I have tapes.
The CDs were still arranged in some form of usable order, over the last few years they've done a sterling job of filling shelves in the living room, keeping the ever expanding collection of books at bay. The tapes, not so much, they fill a couple of baskets and have, over the years, been marauded and predated by a succession of small children. They were in a sort of limbo, I was unlikely ever to play one again, but I couldn't quite bring myself to get rid of them. There were too many memories wrapped up in them. Old bands I'd been in, compilation tapes made by friends, or made for my wife back in the days when I thought that all that was standing between she and I getting together was the right songs in the right order (and for all I know, I was right, it seemed to work out okay). And so, after I'd used the CD player to play the birthday presents that I had rather surprised myself by asking for I popped a tape on. To my immense surprise the sound hadn't degraded half as much as I thought it would, it was listenable. It was also twenty songs that I hadn't listened to in twenty years.
Because the human memory is a fallible thing, and even with this magic world of music on demand, it's easy to forget songs that you love, if there have been enough of them. So I heard Brian Eno's "St Elmo's Fire", with it's glorious seventies warmth and its winding Robert Fripp guitar solo, I heard The Fall's uproarious "I'm a Mummy", Shane MacGowan's brilliant, ferocious "That Woman's Got Me Drinking" which used to be something of anthem around the time when several women had got me drinking, rather than just the one, though that's a story for some other time. I heard many other songs which it wouldn't have occurred to me to search for online, I was taken back, instantly. It was as if a world had been returned to me.
It's also an excellent comeback for the ongoing marital argument as to why I haven't got rid of all those tapes yet, but that's just a bonus.
This post could be about a lot of things. It could be about the obsolescence built into consumer culture, and how getting these tapes out of the box feels like a pleasing two fingers up to it. It could be about how a part of us never fully grows up. It could be about how I'm a hoarder (I don't think I am, others disagree) But one thing it's definitely about is the moment when my wife, son and I were sat at the kitchen table and were startled by a loud click.
"What was that?" Asked Ethan, and I has to think for a moment before I realised.
"It's the sound of a tape finishing one side" I said. My wife burst out laughing.
"That's a sound I haven't heard in twenty years" she said.
"I've never heard it", said Ethan.
"You have now" I said.
This post could be about a number of things, it could be about the way we deal with memory, about how artefacts can bring moments back to us instantly and vividly. It could be about how I'm a lazy swine who never got round to binning stuff which should have been got rid of a long time ago, or it could be about how I, as a middle aged man, am in danger of spending too much time in the past when there's a perfectly good present to be getting on with. It could, viewed in a certain light, be about the power of music to transcend time and space.
It could be about a lot of things, it depends which end you're looking at it from, I suppose.
I'll explain: a few weeks ago, on something of a whim (though it's a thought that I instantly recognised as having been buzzing round the back of my head for a while), I bought a CD player (with, would you believe, a tape deck). I had known, of course, that I didn't have one anymore, the last CD player in the house having been trashed some years before by one of the kids, but I hadn't felt the loss. In this golden technological age of smart toasters, tellies that answer back and a recording device in every room I'd gotten out of the habit, when anything I might want to listen to is instantly available, it's very easy to drift away from the physical act of putting a record on.
I'd been meaning to get one for a while, though without thinking to in any meaningful way; due partly to having a fairly ludicrous amount of CDs that I never quite got round to boxing up and putting away, or selling for a pittance, but also due to a vague realisation that I actually wanted more. I blame Richard Dawson and Anna Meredith, artists who, for the first time in a while I found myself actually wanting to own the records by, the actual physical artefact, just streaming seemed somehow disrespectful. If, on the off chance, either popped round for a cup of tea I wanted to be able to brandish a record and say look, I paid actual money for an actual record. You got actual royalties.
(in the interests of full disclosure I didn't pay a bean, they were bought for me as presents, but the principle still stands)
(and no, I'm not going to wax rhapsodic about them here, neither are particularly approachable and I don't want to get angry replies from people saying they bought them and it was just a bloke shouting and some noisy instrumentals, to each their own, dear reader, but I do bloody love them)
I've always been a little uneasy about the digital age of music. I know that piracy is as old as the industry itself but at least when you taped an album, or, even more giddily, burned it to CD, there was a fairly reasonable chance that someone not too far up the chain had actually paid for the original record. I went along with the lies everyone told themselves for a bit, about the music industry's model being broken, about using filesharing to discover new artists that you'd then buy records by, but gradually settled on the old fashioned conclusion that it was, pretty much, theft (It's probably not a coincidence that this was a view that solidified round about the time I published my first book and thought no, I'd quite like to get the money, thanks). The new age of streaming seems largely to be an excuse for massive tech platforms to avoid actually paying acts much money, which is not a business model which seems overly fair from where I'm sitting.
Ah yes, this post could also be about the out of touch middle aged bloke who bemoans the loss of the world of his youth and froths impotently against the travails of the modern age. Could be that, depends on your point of view. In my defence I cheerfully download stuff (for which I pay money, I think we've covered this bit already), and the internet's ability to bring artists to my ears I might not otherwise have heard of is something I cherish and am regularly astonished by. So on balance, I think not. Go ahead and feel free to think it though, if it gets you through the day.
Right, now we've got all that out of the way, back to the CD player, picked up on the spur of the moment for nine quid in a charity shop. With a tape deck.
Tapes? You cry. Who in the name of all that's holy still has tapes?
Me. That's who. I have tapes.
The CDs were still arranged in some form of usable order, over the last few years they've done a sterling job of filling shelves in the living room, keeping the ever expanding collection of books at bay. The tapes, not so much, they fill a couple of baskets and have, over the years, been marauded and predated by a succession of small children. They were in a sort of limbo, I was unlikely ever to play one again, but I couldn't quite bring myself to get rid of them. There were too many memories wrapped up in them. Old bands I'd been in, compilation tapes made by friends, or made for my wife back in the days when I thought that all that was standing between she and I getting together was the right songs in the right order (and for all I know, I was right, it seemed to work out okay). And so, after I'd used the CD player to play the birthday presents that I had rather surprised myself by asking for I popped a tape on. To my immense surprise the sound hadn't degraded half as much as I thought it would, it was listenable. It was also twenty songs that I hadn't listened to in twenty years.
Because the human memory is a fallible thing, and even with this magic world of music on demand, it's easy to forget songs that you love, if there have been enough of them. So I heard Brian Eno's "St Elmo's Fire", with it's glorious seventies warmth and its winding Robert Fripp guitar solo, I heard The Fall's uproarious "I'm a Mummy", Shane MacGowan's brilliant, ferocious "That Woman's Got Me Drinking" which used to be something of anthem around the time when several women had got me drinking, rather than just the one, though that's a story for some other time. I heard many other songs which it wouldn't have occurred to me to search for online, I was taken back, instantly. It was as if a world had been returned to me.
It's also an excellent comeback for the ongoing marital argument as to why I haven't got rid of all those tapes yet, but that's just a bonus.
This post could be about a lot of things. It could be about the obsolescence built into consumer culture, and how getting these tapes out of the box feels like a pleasing two fingers up to it. It could be about how a part of us never fully grows up. It could be about how I'm a hoarder (I don't think I am, others disagree) But one thing it's definitely about is the moment when my wife, son and I were sat at the kitchen table and were startled by a loud click.
"What was that?" Asked Ethan, and I has to think for a moment before I realised.
"It's the sound of a tape finishing one side" I said. My wife burst out laughing.
"That's a sound I haven't heard in twenty years" she said.
"I've never heard it", said Ethan.
"You have now" I said.
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