Finally, after all these years, I have embraced digital music.
Not that I’ve avoided MP3s, WMAs, WAVs, OGGs, AIFFs, MIDIs, and whatever iTunes uses. I’ve had tons of the things since they first became available, many of them even legally. But they’ve never been real to me.
See, I grew up with record albums. Big dinner-plate-sized discs of black vinyl. They were prone to scratches and warping and breakage and came in cheesy cardboard sleeves the size of museum paintings that attracted mold, and I loved them more than my dog or any given parent. But music enjoyment in those days was hard work. Not just because of the difficulties in avoiding deadly fingerprints or stacking coins on the needle arm to get past the scratches, something that required the intense concentration of a bomb squad agent with hiccups. No, what I spent my time on was organization.
There was something extremely satisfying about hauling six hundred records into three hundred constantly changing stacks and shoving them back onto the sagging shelves in a new and clearly more logical order that would last until the next weekend when I’d rearrange them all over again by year, or personal significance, or album color. Even now the smell of old record albums triggers fond memories and crippling muscle spasms.
Cassettes were never real music; they were what you used to make copies of real music. They never stacked well anyway, they just piled up in your car floorboards. And CDs, they were just toys. Little quarter scale versions of real music. Too easy to carry, too easy to copy, too easy to loan and lose and forget about. And when songs got ripped to computer and become files — in the background, while you were doing something more important — they became even more inconsequential. People dumped songs onto their MP3 players by the gig without even breaking a sweat, without earning them.
I let my MP3s pile up into one massive directory, like an electronic bargain bin.
Then, a few weeks ago, I was idly toying with the options in my music program that I rarely bother with – which would be anything besides “Play” – and noticed something called Super Tagging. I clicked on it.
Suddenly the song I had selected was automatically changed from the mysteriously labeled “havefaith.mp3” to “John Hiatt – Bring The Family – Have A Little Faith In Me.mp3.” The album cover was displayed. The year of publication. The track number. It had a genre.
I realize for many of you who are more experienced with digital music this is like watching someone playfully press down on the gas pedal after previously only ever using their car as a cigarette lighter, but for me it was a revelation that reawakened the dangerously anal side of me with a vengeance. There was organization to be done.
I spent the next week hunched over my keyboard. Should Dream Theater’s version of Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” be filed under Dream Theater, Pink Floyd, or Covers? Is Matchbox Twenty “Pop Rock,” “Alternative Rock,” or “Post Grunge?” Does “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” belong to Blue Oyster Cult or the “Scream” soundtrack? I anguished for hours trying to decide if I should put Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman” under “Greatest Hits Vol. I & II” (where I got it), “The Stranger” (where it debuted), or off my computer entirely (before anyone I knew caught me singing along).
I rushed off to rip CDs I’d never bothered with before just to build the perfect collection and reorganize them over and over. Napster and iTunes and allofmp3.com abruptly received sharp spikes in their profit margins as I bought songs by the fistful to fill gaps I hadn’t realized I had. Songs I hadn’t heard in decades, songs I hadn’t even particularly liked the first time, were suddenly vitally important to have.
I catalogued them all.
Finally, at 3:45 Sunday morning, I sat back amongst my empty Coke cans and Dorito bags, and my back creaked in a way I hadn’t felt in many years. And it was good. I had a collection again.
Someday I might even listen to some of this stuff.