The Resuscitation of the Compact Disc

When I first started collecting music the medium of choice was tape. My older sister had a grand collection of cassingles -all the greatest pop and rock hits from the late eighties and early nineties on short cassettes. She could buy one at a time, at a cheaper price, than paying for a tape of the whole album. She did get whole albums on tape -for some of her favorite groups, but often a cassingle would suffice. One to three or four tracks, sometimes with an instrumental on the B side, so you could sing it yourself. When I started buying my own music, tapes were the medium I (my parents) could afford. Allowances could be saved up for a tape, or they’d get me one as a special treat, along the lines of the paperback books and comics they bought for me too. Thanks mom and dad. I know you worked hard for stuff you didn’t like yourself and even found quite questionable.           

​At the time CD’s were still expensive, and we didn’t have a CD player in the house, probably until sometime in the nineties. It was just boomboxes with a tape player, or my sisters non-component stereo system. I still remember my first tape, the one I bought at what is now a dead mall, Forest Fair Mall. We went there to celebrate my eleventh birthday with a few friends from the street. I grabbed Anthrax’s, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tape, that had their “I’m the Man” track on it, which I’d heard from an older metalhead down the street. My mom wanted to take it back after she found it out what it was on the tape, but somehow I got her to let me keep it. There are advantages to being the youngest of three, as my older sisters never forget to tell me. 

​​I’m not quite sure what my first CD was, but I do know that when I got into punk a few years later, so much of it was on cassette. Taped by my older friend Andy Gable, who turned me on to so much good music, and then by other people. All of us made mix tapes and traded them with each other all the time. Some were for courting. Some were for tripping. Some were for rocking out.
            When I really started buying CDs I was drifting more and more into electronic music and industrial material. One of the first ones I bought was the Future Sounds of London, Lifeforms. I remember my friend Erik criticized it saying it was just a bunch of sound effects, but for me it was a doorway into my ambient listening habit which has continued to this day.
            Recently, while reorganizing the home multimedia library, I went through my entire CD collection and weeded it out. Periodic weeding is necessary in any collection if you want it to remain a collection, and not slip into the realm of the hoarder. It might be a fine line, and I realize I might get some flak for the idea of weeding the collection all, especially from my hoarder friends. Sometimes I’ve weeded and regretted what I got rid of… but most of the time, I haven’t missed the things I let go of. Hopefully they are making someone else happy now instead of just sitting on my shelves.

​​For awhile I stopped buying CDs, around the time when I stopped being a regular programmer on WAIF. Between 2001 and 2014 when I was on the air very regularly, towards the end, I got burned out and even got sick of listening to music. I got over that sickness after about a two-year break. Then I got into it again.
            Well, I never really totally stopped buying CDs or ever stopped listening. But a break from the way I had been doing it was necessary. When doing the two-hour radio show every other week or every week, I needed to have a constant supply of new stuff to play. Or I felt like I did anyway.
During the pandemic and when I’d gotten my musical mojo back, I started getting into building a Bandcamp and adding to my cache of files on the hard drive. Another collection built around things I ripped from the library and from friends.
Yet I still love a CD. I love reading the liner notes. I love the way it is easy to rip them to use in a DAW when making mixes for Imaginary Stations. And though I’m not on WAIF every week anymore, I do go up a few times a year to fill in for Ken Katkin’s Trash Flow Radio, and I still think the best way to do the show is to make two fully loaded mixed CD’s that I can then select from while on the air.
And I never stopped scouring the thrift store for CD’s or going through the bins of used CDs at the record store. It’s interesting because my local shop, Shake It!, doesn’t really even have a new CD section anymore. I spent a lot of money there on CD’s before the vinyl boom took off again. Now the store is very different than it was in terms of all the new music that is out on vinyl and all the used music is on CD. The trend has flip-flopped. I do buy vinyl, but not in huge quantities.
             Getting used CD’s has really come into its own again. It’s a great time for CD collectors to go out on the hunt again, because people are ditching their physical collections in favor of streaming. I think that’s a mistake, because unless you are your own streaming platform, ISP, or have your own internet radio station, someone else will always have control over your ability to access, download, or get to the music you want to hear and listen to.
            Sure, someone can rob or steal your physical stuff, or it could disappear without you knowing what happened, as if often the case when small little things get stolen by elves and pixies. Sure, physical media can be destroyed. Certainly, you can’t take your CD collection with you when the body is set aside at physical death. But perhaps some collectors will want to be buried with their media. None-the-less, if you want to listen to music offline, now is a good time to start raking through the used bins at your favorite record store, at yard and garage sales, at the thrift and charity shops. Vinyl is in demand, and even cassettes are in demand, but CDs are being turned back into the wilds of the secondhand market by those who believe a digital singularity is just around the corner.
            In combing the secondhand market I have been able to get a lot of good music that I couldn’t either afford back in the earlier heyday of my collecting, or that I I couldn’t find or obtain. Now it is out there, waiting to be found. I like looking at used CDs the same way I like looking at used books: there is serendipity at work in what you will find, synchronicity at play in the thing you want and need finding its way to you. I’ve also heard reports of people finding really amazing things: $1 dollar Steve Roach CD’s (his music is timeless and priceless), Sun Ra boxed sets at the thrift store. Other friends are reporting rare underground records from The Hafler Trio, Current and the album Le Mystere De Voix Bulgares, an influence on the vocal techinques of Lisa Gerard and Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance.

​This past fall I was tipped off by a coworker that the local NPR affiliate WVXU/WGUC was giving away boxes and boxes of CDs from their radio library. I went by and picked up several. The only rule there was you had to take everything in a box even if you only wanted one disc. But I managed to find some great recordings from the Hearts of Space label and a Hildegard Von Bingen box set.
            WVXU should know that keeping a collection is an archival commitment. It takes up space and time. They were in the process of moving to their new location, and so they had to free up some space to deliver more airtime. Some people don’t want to commit to the physical space CDs take, but too much streaming ends up cheapening the listening experience because it doesn’t take up space you have to commit too, and it fills time in such a way that almost anything will do (cue joke about the ubiquity of lo-fi beats for experiencing boredom). For them, I suggest the solid nineties option of a binder to put their CD’s and liner notes in. This doesn’t work as well as digipaks, but is still worth doing. It’s also good for burned CDs and very good for information gathered on hacking exploits as we learned from Mr. Robot.               

​There is another reason to build a physical music collection of your own. Streaming platforms may be fickle, and they aren’t great to artists either, but the energy they consume from the natures storehouse of ancient sunlight has very real limits. The amount of power it takes to keep the so-called “cloud” running is enormous. A little boombox could run on power from a generator or some off-grid solar panels in case of an energy disruption. The rolling brown outs and weather disruptions that have become more common with global weirding may mean a loss of internet connectivity for extended durations, especially as our ability to cope with these happenings is thwarted by the law of limits. Having some music on hand while you weather the literal storms can go a long way to making the psychological aspect of a long emergency much more manageable.
            It also makes economic sense to build a physical collection of music you enjoy. Many people cut the cord of cable for their television viewing habits and saved money by having a Netflix or Hulu subscription. That was when these first got going, but now people want to have every show from every platform available with a click, plus a Spotify subscription to have access to a world of music. Plus some Substack subscriptions to read some of their favorite independent journalists and writers (these are probably the best choice). I have done all this myself. Yet as stagflation sets in, it now may time to dam up the streams, collect physical media, and put up antennas for over-the-air reception of media. I’ve canceled several streaming subscriptions or memberships to certain services or platforms so that our household can save a bit of dough. My wages may have gone up over the years, but so have the prices for everything, and the standard of living has been going down ever since the 1970s. Being frugal and thrifty when it comes to entertainment, and having something physical listening on hand is a way to cut back on streaming services.
            It’s also a way to slow down, to really listen to entire albums, and to be more selective in how you feed your imagination and mind.
            The library is another option if you want to save even more money. Many have CD collections that are worth mining, and even a modest collection will have gems. My own work in writing about avantgarde music would have been impossible if I hadn’t been turned on to a world of music with “no commercial value,” but of immense cultural value. Libraries, community radio stations, and local PBS affiliates all have a role to play in preserving and transmitting things of cultural value, that may not have much mass appeal as commodified music in the capitalist system, but create the wealth that can be enjoyed by living a life of the mind. I hope families and individuals who are strapped can continue to turn to these resources for their education, entertainment, and edification.
            Beyond all that it is simply fun to pick through the detritus of the age and find your own listening treasure. Let us resuscitate the compact disc. Keep on digging!