By Joel Hartse
A scene from the 2000 pop-music-geek film, High Fidelity:
Dick: It looks as if you're reorganizing your records. What is this, chronological?
Rob: No.
Dick: Not alphabetical.
Rob: Nope.
Dick: What?
Rob: Autobiographical.
Dick: No fucking way.
Rob: Yep. I can tell you how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin’ Wolf in just 25 moves.
Dick: Oh my God.
Rob: And, if I want to find the song "Landslide," by Fleetwood Mac, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile, but didn't give it to them for personal reasons.
Dick: That sounds....
Rob: Comforting?
Dick: Yes.
Rob: It is.
Admit it—you, too, were tempted to do this when you saw the film. (Or you are now.) The glorious thing about the way we build our idiosyncratic rock canons is just how personal the process is. We can all agree on the Beatles, probably, but after that it’s mostly up for grabs, and if you don’t believe me, I’d be happy to explain all the reasons why the obscure 1995 Christian rock record Mercury by the Prayer Chain means more to me than Nirvana’s Nevermind.
I don’t own any Deep Purple records, but I can get from Sixpence None the Richer to the Squirrel Nut Zippers in only four moves, and those moves involve almost everything that was important to me during the years I acquired those records: magazines, MTV, the radio, church, girls, school, and playing in bands. I remember almost every CD I ever bought—what day it was, what the weather was like, who I was with.
I remember holding My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless in my hands as I sat in a now bankrupt big box store, as those first four snare hits and subsequent wave of glorious sludge that was “Only Shallow” penetrated my brain through the store’s standard-issue goofy, padded headphones.
I remember my girlfriend standing by my locker, saying “happy birthday” and handing me a copy of a record I could have sworn she already knew that I had, since I had just shown it to her at my house a few weeks before, and wondering if this meant that things were not going well.
I remember how good it felt to give someone a copy of Sixpence None the Richer’s self-titled album—something I did all the time, almost as often as I gave copies of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey as gifts—how much it felt like giving a piece of myself to someone I cared about.
But I have not actually bought an honest-to-God physical CD, one that I was really excited about, in years. Nobody has handed me a CD and said, “man, you’ve got to hear this” for even longer. (I’m excluding records I get for free in the mail, which are completely devoid of that warm fuzzy feeling one often gets when one gets records one truly wants, as well as the CDs I bought during the last two years for the purpose of educating myself about genres I’m unfamiliar with, like classical guitar and Chinese rock.)
I swore I wouldn’t become the curmudgeon complaining about format changes in music—I was all for CDs replacing cassettes—and actually, I like that I store my entire record collection electronically in a plastic box the size of a Bible, and listen to any song I want without having to spend ten minutes looking for a CD.
But I do regret the musical amnesia I am starting to develop about my favorite new recordings, how divorced the music is from the lifeworld I used to inhabit, how the story behind nearly every album I have fallen in love with in the past five years is not “My friend told me about this while we were at dinner” or even “I heard this on the radio and then bought it at the record store on the way home from work,” but “somebody emailed me a .zip file encoded with this music.”
That is so lame. And it makes me worry that my memories of music will be forever linked to my increasingly disturbing (to me) 1990s nostalgia, that the Undertones were right: “teenage dreams, so hard to beat.”
I don’t think music has to be encoded on a physical product in order to be meaningful—however material it may technically be, sound is not exactly tangible—but pop music lately feels like it has less weight and heft than at any other time I can remember. Not because it’s “worse” in a lamenting-the-vacuous-top-40 sense, but because I can’t seem to locate my own stories in it the way I used to.
On the computer, my record collection can be arranged by genre, year, record label, artist, album title, length of song, and dozens of other criteria. Reorganizing it takes about two seconds. The physical act of autobiographical rearranging, and the comfort it brings, is looking more and more like another one of those bygone teenage kicks.
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My album-buying has petered out over the last few years, in part because of finances and a stubborn slowness about new music - but in part, I imagine, because most of the new music recommended to me is offered in the form of links.
Sixpence's self-titled album, yes. "The brown album." I was just compiling a list of fall listens, and that album ranks pretty high. It even LOOKS like fall... if you have the actual liner notes in your hand, anyway.
The CD swap idea is brilliant. I think I'll use it for this Xmas. Joel, start working on yours!
Albums died when I was in college. I'm glad I got to experience them at least a bit, and hold those treasures in hand.
At the end of the evening, not only do I have 300 - 400 songs that mean a lot to people whose lives I value, but I have some great stories that connect me to the songs. Everybody gets to share one song from the mix CD, and a one-minute monologue on why it is significant to them. The whole process takes several hours, but it's incredibly worthwhile, relationally and musically. And it helps to establish those autobiographical (or at least biographical) ties that are, as you note, so very meaningful.
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