As I was driving this morning to collect my 15 year old daughter from her friend’s house after last night’s sleep over, and the satellite provided music in my car was blaring, it occurred to me that she will never know music the way I have. Indeed the way many of us over 40 have. I felt sad. I couldn’t tell if I was sad for me or sad for her. Perhaps it was a little bit of both.
She will never know what it is like to stayed glued to the radio to listen to a newly released song she cannot yet buy or in some other way acquire. She will never understand that when she buys a single song, she should get something on the other side…a bonus song that she may be familiar with but a different version, one she hadn’t heard before and now she has something wonderfully exciting that she can hold in her hands. Just being aware of this extra song, this different version of something known separates her from her friends as a “true fan.”
She will never understand walking into a record store. You know the kind, not the corporate record store that used to have shops across the country, but a mom & pop store where you are confronted with employees who know everything about everything related to music. The people who live and breathe music and condescend to you if you admit to liking anything related to pop music. But that store specializes in rare and hard to find albums that were truly rare and hard to find. And she will never understand going to the bin of her favorite band seeing something she was unaware even existed. She’ll never hold it in her hands and turn it over to read the notes and wonder if this truly is a different version of the song she already owns three different versions of. Just to buy it anyway.
I remember going into a store and finding something called “bootlegs” where I got to hear my band playing live music at some club I had never heard of in some country I had never been to. And the recording was for crap because some guy was holding up his recordable walkman all concert long and half the time you listened to him and those around him singing instead of the band. But it was special because it was like you were there too. She will never experience that. Nor record swap meets, which in a way were the precursor to comic-cons. A social environment where audiophiles and hardcore fanatics met up and geeked out together. She’ll never be able to find the first record her favorite band ever pressed but only printed 1000 of them and they were hand numbered by some marketing genius who was just trying to get that band noticed and now that first record is worth thousands to collectors.
And album art. I suppose there exists some minimalist version of album art these days, especially if a band goes on the road. After all, they do have to market this thing they’re digitally selling. But album art used to define a band. Remember Journey’s or Van Halen’s or Led Zeppelin’s album covers? You knew what you were getting before you opened it up and put it on your turntable. She will never understand that feeling of putting the record on for the first time while plopping down on her bed and opening up the album lyrics that were so graciously provided – sometimes in the handwriting of the singer of the song! Listening again and again trying to memorize each song while driving your family crazy for how often you played it.
No, her music life if different from what I knew growing up. Hers is one of instant gratification and knowing only a few songs from any particular artist. Hers is being able to see nearly any concert or any appearance on any tv show from across the globe at any time. Hers is music directly input into her ears and not shared with the community around her in large booming speakers that shake the walls. She will miss the smells of the store, the dust that has piled up on those unwanted record compilation records that no one really wanted. And she will never have a collection of records that store on a shelf that bring back memories so intense when years later, she pulls one down and remembers exactly where it was purchased, which friend was with her when she did, and the magic of privately listening to something so fantastic that it is transcends space and time.
I miss music the way it used to be. I may just have to take my old turn table out of the box it’s been in for the past 2 decades and plug it into my stereo system that has also been in storage for that length of time.
Rock on.