It took me 19 years to build a CD collection that currently tops out at over 3000 discs. It took me only a few hours to pack them all into plastic tubs. I'm not selling them. I couldn't do that. But, apart from a single shelf dedicated to new releases and discs my wife and I listen to in the car, I'm putting them away, at least for now.
That a fair amount of free CDs, DVDs, and books float across my desk is one of the best benefits of doing what I do. Sometimes I wonder if it's why I got into this in the first place. Sure, I love to write and it's best for everyone around me that my job gives me an outlet for pushy opinionizing. But, given that I had a lifelong habit of spending far too much of my money on movies, books, and music before I started writing about it professionally, it was definitely a part of the attraction from the start.
A lot of that spending was on compact discs, the miracle format of the '80s that promised, and mostly delivered, recorded music of heretofore undreamed of clarity in a format that you could hold in the palm of your hand. While I would love to claim the long, sentimental attachment to vinyl that seems to be a prerequisite for being a hardcore music nerd, I can't. I was a CD kid through and through. But, as they have for most people, CDs have become secondary for me. I rip them and put them aside. And though they may be compact, they can still take up a lot of room, which is something I don't have in great abundance. Thus the tubs. Thus the trip down to basement purgatory.
Packing them up took me back, however. Indulge me a little nostalgia.
1988: I won't own a CD player until Christmas, but I know I'm definitely getting one then having picked out a CD boombox at Radio Shack. It's expensive, but it's all I really want. On a marching band trip I buy my first CD: Green by R.E.M. I have a friend tape it for me and I stare at the liner notes while it plays. I read somewhere, that the cover is orange because orange is the negative color of green and that if you stare at it long enough and close your eyes you'll see green. I never get it to work. After Christmas, I buy two CDs, one by Midnight Oil and one by The Church. It was a good year for Australian rock.
1989: A part time job as a Taco Bell fry cook means money for more CDs. There's a store on the south side of Dayton, my hometown, that has an amazing selection with prices that top out at $12.99. I buy them at least two a pop once a week. 1989 becomes my musical year zero. I buy new albums from Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, XTC, Neil Young and Prince. Maybe they're not anyone's best albums–I'm pretty certain that the Batman soundtrack doesn't hold up all that well–but I love them and they send me back through the artists' back catalogs then back further through the artists that inspired them. I buy Rust Never Sleeps. I buy Armed Forces. I buy a Velvet Underground best-of and turn the volume down low when it hits words I don't want my parents to hear.
1990 – summer 1991: Used CD stores teach me that mistakes can be corrected. Someone, not me of course, but someone, who owns the Phantom Of The Opera soundtrack can trade it for Fear Of A Black Planet.
Fall 1991 – summer 1993: I go to college at a small liberal arts school called Wittenberg in Springfield, Ohio, a town short on many things that make life worth living, record stores among them. Buying an album means a trip to the mall via bus to pay mall prices.
Fortunately, there's college radio in the form of WUSO and all the access to music that comes from that. I start out, with my partner Dave, DJing a 6am to 8am shift on Friday mornings. We get promoted to the midnight to 3am shift on Saturdays. Sometimes we keep going until the classical music guy shows up at 6am on Sunday mornings. I take a job as the assistant music director and spend many hours putting CDs into plastic cases called "carts" to make them easier to store and less desirable to steal.
Meanwhile, I sign up for BMG Music Service. Later, once I move off campus, I sign up again, netting free CDs for myself and my friend "Donald Davenport." (Film fans, tell me where that name comes from.)
Fall 1993 – summer 1994: I study abroad at an English school called Lancaster University and I have to spend the year without a CD player. I still buy them, of course, and have my new friends tape them for me. I can't afford that many but the ones I do buy I listen to obsessively. On my Walkman I ride a Eurail pass across the continent in the spring. I listen to Brutal Youth and Come On Feel The Lemonheads every day.
1995 – 1996: After returning and graduating from college I pack off to grad school in Madison, Wisconsin. It's a great town for record stores and still home to my favorite shop on the planet. (Hello, B-Side.) But it's not so great on a grad student's budget. I buy when I can but more often I find myself making brutal cuts in my collection to avoid running out of money. If I haven't listened to it in a few months, the disc has to go. Some of the cuts I made still appall me. I can't even write them here. By the end of the year I'm out of grad school and working in a video store. The free rentals are great for satisfying one kind of cultural need but I still can't buy too many CDs and when I buy something that disappoints me it really hurts. Southpaw Grammar and New Adventures In Hi-Fi still carry a sting.
1997 – summer 2001: Onion Inc. sees fit to bring me on full time (thanks!) and I suddenly have access to free music and a steady paycheck. I re-purchase all those painful cuts. I look for gaps in my musical knowledge and I seek to fill them. I'm back to buying two CDs at a time, sometimes more than once a week. A trip to B-Side can yield anything from Blue Lines to Darkness On The Edge Of Town to The All-Seeing Eye to Super Ape. A succession of not-huge apartments gets filled with CD cases. It's a dream come true. Sometimes the cases crunch under my feet when I walk.
Meanwhile, I keep hearing about these "MP3s." Like everyone else, I log onto Napster but the legalities of it bother me and the legitimacy of it bothers me even more. Without something to hold in my hand, it doesn't feel like I really have the music. I mostly use it for obscurities. One night I download as many versions of "Nature Boy" as I can find.
2001 – 2006: A move to Chicago, where the money doesn't go quite as far, coincides with my first iPod. Suddenly, digital music makes sense. I can carry album after album with me. I can listen to it on headphones or plug it into a stereo anywhere. I still need the discs but the need starts to feel less profound. Why do I still need CDs? I like the cover art, but I can see that on my monitor. I like the liner notes and lyrics, but all that's online. Is it just force of habit?
In the meantime, I take on the project of ripping every disc in my collection. It takes a year. My friend Andrew, who's doing the same, says he can't wait to finish so he can put all his discs in the attic. Part of me recoils at the thought. Another part of me sees the advantage of all that extra space.
2007: I listen to music more broadly than ever and just as deeply as before but I hardly ever play CDs. I still want to have the discs but I don't have to have the discs. Something downloaded from eMusic doesn't feel less legitimate and I sometimes forget whether I even own something on disc or not. I keep the discs because they have a higher sound quality, but I don't honestly hear it. Stranded on vacation without any music, my wife and I buy some recent albums I already have digitally. It feels good but I also feel like I'm wasting money. I miss the ritual of going to the record store for new releases, but I still hit them up for older music. And after I rip those discs, I put them aside and listen to them digitally. In my heart, I know it's over.
So, into the tubs they go. And as much as I know it's the right move, it also makes me sad. There was a month in 1998 where I'm not sure I had a better friend than the Townes Van Zandt album High, Low And In Between. I can't stand the thought of it down in the basement so I save it for the "stay upstairs" pile.
I once saw an interview Bryan Ferry where he complained that CD listeners lacked the "tactile" relationship with their music that vinyl fans enjoyed. If he only knew what was coming. I'm pretty sure I'm from the last generation to grow up touching music. I guess I could get rid of them, but I keep thinking about the dream house I'll maybe own down the line, one with a wall of shelves for all my CDs that my as-yet-still-imaginary kids–who will, of course, never rebel against their dad's great taste in music–will be able to look at, and listen to, and touch. Whether that makes the music better, I honestly can't say.