Scrambled Channel

disposable music

Everyone I know is out of town so I finally got around to sorting out and properly tagging my mp3 collection. I was reminded of that scene in High Fidelity where Rob is responding to the disintegration of his relationship by sorting out his record collection. He sorts them into autobiographical order and I was half expecting that going through all this music would be a big nostalgia trip for me too. I was a little disappointed by the whole experience though. You odn’t really get all misty eyed thinking about the night you downloaded The Gourds’ cover of Gin and Juice. It wasn’t exactly a complete collection either being mainly stuff I’d gathered since I’ve been travelling. All in all, not the fascinating, introspective evening I was looking forward to.

Of course sorting a whole bunch of computer files is a different proposition than sorting records. They don’t take up any physical space (although keeping possessions on disk is pretty analogous to storing physical objects on a bookshelf). I found it a lot easier to throw stuff away though and I think this is mainly because there isn’t an actual object to read, hold, smell and taste. Well maybe not taste. I found that as the night went on, I became more and more trigger happy. Can’t find a tag for that obscure track that you’ve listened to once in 3 years? Bin it. Rather than listening to most of a track, I’d listen to a couple of seconds of the intro, a couple of seconds in the middle somewhere… oh fuck it, don’t really like this.

I know this relaxed approach comes partly from the fact that I didn’t pay for most of this stuff. However, it’s obviously easier to throw away pure data. There’s something a lot graver about taking a physical object and removing it from you house, knowing that you’ll never see it again. I know I’ve held on to some really bad CDs for this reason.

I guess that music, and anything that we can consume in a purely digital form, has become essentially disposable. Maybe this is why the kids are listening to increasingly banal crap with every passing year. Or is that just what every generation of 20 somethings thinks of the music taste of teenagers?

Tags: digital, diposable, future, music

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