I’ve been paring down my CD collection in recent weeks and it’s given me occasion to reflect on my behavior in roughly a decade or so of heavy music consumption.
What have I learned? Who was that guy? I remember spending many a night at Mondo Kim’s or AKA or pretty much any record store, fiending in the used bin for anything noteworthy. Now I’m reaping the whirlwind.
There are discs that I’ve owned for ages that remain unopened, yet they still have sentimental value simply because I can remember buying them and then carrying them from dorm to apartment to dorm to apartment to house. Yet I can’t part with them.
I’ve come to the decidedly rockist conclusion that the endgame of this purge is to select those artists whose work has ongoing meaning in my life and hold them fast and shake the rest out. Another way of saying this is that I’m applying the auteur theory in the most vulgar manner possible to reduce the number of total CDs in my collection, those that I won’t just rip and forget for all eternity.
For those of us clinging to physical media in a digital media world, it’s a game of “desert island discs” renewed, with a twist. What CDs would you keep to avoid your favorite tunes vanishing into the ether after your harddrive crashed?
well, all of them but in particular
destroyer-“your blues”
simon and garfunkel-“bookends”
phoenix-“wolfgang amadeus phoenix”
sly and the family stone-“there’s a riot going on”
and a new addition
elton john-“goodbye yellow brick road”
Pretty amazing list. I’ve spared a couple that are on your list. I’m trying
to keep it to specific artists and their entire discography, but that, too,
gets onerous. It’s like I love Can and Kraftwerk and Sonic Youth and
Destroyer and Broadcast and Electrelane…but where to go with all of these
albums? I think it’s so funny because I’ve toted them around for years and
it’s only become an issue in the past two years. Just feel like there’s no
enough physical or psychical space to maintain them!