As part of my effort to curb the sprawl currently rendering my basement unusable, I'm working my way through boxes, one by one, judging their contents, and either refiling them in a concise fashion, or selling/discarding them.
This process has been ongoing for a few weeks now, and I finally reached the most difficult part of it: assessing my CD collection.
I don't know how many CDs I have -I stopped counting at a thousand- but I do know that sifting through them is like examining clay layers in an archeological dig; each box, each stack, each pile represents a time in my life, and contains, preserved forever, a set of experiences and memories...some good, some not.
There are long-forgotten EPs (who remembers the band Dandelion???), curious CD singles (Freddie Mercury singing "The Great Pretender"), and hard-found collectibles now made less exotic by the age of MP3s (my cherished box set of Oasis singles and B-sides, imported from Britain, which cost somewhere in the neighborhood of nine million dollars.)
At the risk of sounding like The Old Guy In The Record Store, it's worth noting that many of my imports and collections came with small tchotchkes, and, as we move further into the digital era, these things will be lost---some future version of Rick will have to do without the AC/DC bottle opener that accompanied the Bon Scott box set.
And so, speaking of the modern era, my true task is upon me. I must now begin the laborious job of archiving all (or at least most) of my CDs digitally. This is one of those things that, like creating a library's card catalog, will be great (and relatively easy to maintain) once it's done. Actually doing it however, requires endless, tedious hours of pointing, clicking, stacking, and sorting. Worst of all are those not-too-rare times when the online CD identifier fails to recognize some disc or other (although I was impressed to see that Slam Suzanne's
On the Floor with Your Mom was in their database.) In such cases, ten or twelve different song titles must all be entered by hand, along with year of release, genre, composer, etc. (Well....I guess they don't
have to be, but if I don't do it, the OCD fairies start to call to me at night, and I find myself at the keyboard, blearily pecking in the names of a dozen obscure Carcass songs.)
In the end, though, it's worth it, if only for the absolute, physical proof it provides of music's importance in my life. Looking around my office, and taking in the endless mountains of CDs (vinyl archiving comes next), I don't think about the work, the storage space my newly-organized collection will take, or even the tens of tousands of dollars I must have spent on this music. Instead, I think about where I was when I bought a certain album, or how long I waited in line to purchase something I deemed especially important.
My mom once said that you could measure a person by how they treated their books. I would extend that to include their treatment of the music they own. So...my VHS
Blackadder collection? Gone. My inexplicable mound of blank reel-to-reel tapes? History. But the music? Ah, the music...remains.
