Amazing set for only $30:

• 5x Super Audio CD (SACD) with 5.1 mixes
• 2x Blu-ray Pure Audio with one included performance video

SACD is a 1-bit format with an extremely high sample rate (2.8224 MHz) and up to six channels of discrete sound. It never really broke through but has a niche following

Made an all-organic matcha latte:

• organic powder, oat milk, and sugar
• used an electric milk frother to dissolve the powder clumps in hot water
• flash-chilled it in a HyperChiller

That Dark Souls feeling when you approach a place you’ve been before, but from an unfamiliar angle, and it takes a second to realize where you are, except in real life…

This is the belated follow-up to my earlier NaNoWriMo post.

–

The old house once removed and no longer standing still stuck that endless day into the sky like a CD spindle, capturing reddish swirling light from the sun almost tucked into bed behind the knobs. Hooked up to a computer in a room that’s since been crushed and vaporized, sometime in 2002 with my desktop speakers whistling through the thin-insulation-invading air, I searched for a review of Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age. I’d mostly read about in Rolling Stone and the breathless British music press (“It belongs in the Tate Modern, 9/10”) and now I got to see some air wheezing out of its balloon that floated like the Adobe Illustrator birthed one on the cover of a 2008 trance music compilation I’d yet to even hear someday would, in the lights over Louisville far away. Less than 8.0 out of 10, said pitchforkmedia.com. An obsession is born, one that’ll be remade and recast with album reviews for the next 22 years, it’ll pull with a homepage-visit magnetism that’ll become a relic of an antique online land where push notifications weren’t born yet let alone passé.

“Remember that closing to the review of Wolf Parade’s debut? ‘Other folks will still remember where they were when they first heard Apologies to the Queen Mary’? We were out there helping move people into the dormitories of a university overseen by Ozymandias himself the day that was published, incoming blue-faced boxers going to study comparative lit beneath the banner of a Johnny Cash album cover and a muddy shoeprinted flyer for a party bearing John Coltrane’s photorealistic portrait. And on the web.archive.org pedestal, these words appear: ‘Shit, cat.’ I thought the maintenance guy had also said something like that to me as he pushed a coffin-sized cart past underneath the archway glowing damply into the quadrangle where the afternoon sun shone like a face shiny with too much sunscreen in a staring contest.

A puzzled (house) cat, fundamentally: But silently seeming to move in the sky instead of just meowing to end the eye-contact faceoff it’s destined to win with its always-on mouse-alert camera-eyes, big discs like unspinning microglitch records, knowing we’d blink first and retreat into the dorms to contemplate the paper artifacts of freshman-year essays, class scheduling cards, paper course catalogs, notepads with scribbles from landline calls to our rooms, scratched up, all of them, by cats intruding on daylight while we were off at class .”

“Yes, he was looking onward and backward, breathing so hard and shouting ‘Carpe diem’ and thinking this is what optimizing your life is, sucking the air desperately and secretly drearily like someone’s cock you know in advance you’ll only get one taste of, dismissively throat-punched and briefly breathless because you’re as disposable as the paper campus welcome pack 10 years later when you can feel the dust accumulating on your body itself, the paper becoming uncanny to feel because now it’s part of your body, too, maybe it’s all this detritus that makes weight gain unavoidable. The past is a basket that keeps filling up with anvils that I’m obligated to carry and then, even then, it was already ‘bodybuilder’s build’-esque enough, relentlessly solid and heavy despite a surprisingly slight profile that caressing it forced me to pull myself off the floor after a ‘footage not found’ interlude so I could gather for the daily Gospel reading, a 0.0 Pitchfork review of a Dismemberment Plan frontman’s first solo effort, which immediately made air a sacred commodity again.”

“Did you record your reaction?”

“I mean, it’s still there, on the site, it didn’t even get a revision during their second chance series. Reaction videos are some cities-of-the-plain style energy, God knows everyone hates that, they’re for performative enjoyment when the content itself is a pleasure dulled by being mass-produced at an unconsummable scale even for an online completionist and franchised to death, ‘oh look at how HARD I’m laughing at each timestamped moment.’ I should do that for that review, document myself breaking character hard as I react to how the lyrics apparently give no sense of closure, the actual mortal sin that Eve committed in Eden while she was composing some sensuous post-rock and decided to fill it out with some sleepy, dopey vocals, recorded after she’d eaten the fruit and they’d stayed up all night fucking as Milton so carefully described.”

“Speaking of which…let’s go lie down in the quad.”

“I don’t have any blankets, and without them, I’m naked to the grass and the world—”

The quad is minded by kids turned into fully grown skeletons with clipboards, fingered bonily with more speed than either thought or an uninvented iPad could muster. The crowd speaks from beyond in a cursed undocumented post-Tower of Babel tongue and there’s talk of Mogwai, how if you mixed their albums into one playlist you couldn’t even tell where one ended and another began unless you’d once been the grindset type who spent all night in online forum research rituals, soundtracking your long drives along roads dark as VHS magnetic tape spared from light while you hallucinate cat’s eyes looking at you in the trees to the side that have definitely been used as scratchposts for massive paws shaped like a playful mouse cursor indicator that the game was safely paused. They’re quiet, though, keeping alive the myth that nighttime is just the world on pause mode instead of when it rewinds itself, respools its energy to catch you in the sun-hot pain of its feline teeth the next day.

“In that case, I’ll go get some myself. But I’m fine if you want to go ask about the Mogwai discourse, in fact I’ll feel for now welcomed when you go. I’m gonna make it after all. We’ll part and then I’ll be embraced by the invisible entirety of the ‘gay community’ in the interim, who’re just out of frame in my room where I’m back reading the Wolf Parade review again and thinking ‘this is where I’ll remember I was, and though it’s a thin condom’s width away from the feeling of an abanoned house weighted down by old computers and boarded up rooms.’ Nostalgia is the desire for a previous era of commodification, it’s looking back at a computer catalog and reveling in not only how close it feels but how far, the missing pages and bygone references that were once manufactured with obsessive all-nighter paper-writer energy long since turned into sewer-clogging trash.

“I’m going to hide under the arch and think about my afternoonlong journey out into the soft storm to buy Zen Arcade by myself. I felt, in my every joint, a resolute anti-loneliness on that impromptu walk—no one arguing with me, no one flicking on and off a gas light in the attic when I was looking for my keys while giving a soliloquy about the impossibility of sending 5.1 PCM audio over an optical audio connection despite its seeming sci-fi future-codedness, no anxiety from seeing some guy’s yellow undershirt if I’d fatefully stepped into the dining hall on the way there. I was alone except for my thoughts and my iPod, no way I was lonely enough to even think of taking my cellphone with me, that is the total security of knowing that anything could wait, that there was anti-radioactive armor ensconcing me in a public boudoir.”

I’m still driving and now it’s light enough to see the old house catching some red-wavelength light to stir the shadows and make then rotate up into oblivion, for now. It’s safe, music is coming from within, people from across the street are coming over to start picking their own corn.

“When I finally got there, the record store was folded away in a sleeve-like building quietly off the crackling university thoroughfare. You were with me the whole time—”

“Yes, I came after all, you weren’t even the hero of your own story.”

“—and we’d become blue clouds: Like tiny software icons, dark logos with shapeless God-faces like cooled-down burning bushes optimally colored to pop and sizzle someday against the white-hot apocalypse sky. But for now: Stretched to fuzzy resolutions across mere pollution. With a tear I’d stolen from the rainbow—a lubricant for fucking around in reverie—I opened the record store door on the side of the mountain that scratched the palette-swapped cirrus. Where is childhood? Is it in here?”

The hillside avenues glittered outside. A man with a blue face, not enough oxygen to appear on Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, approached me inside and asked if I liked Wolf Parade.

“I remember where I was when I read the review, but for a while I only thought they were some screechy guys with tight jackets listened to by people who overdress during mild winters. When I heard it, I filed away ‘I’ll Believe in Anything’ because I knew I’d have some moments with it, when I’d want to look back on where I was, the sad times when I was enjoying something that has to be aged before it tastes of eventual happiness.”

Meanwhile, Zen Arcade, it gave me the courage to no longer wear sunglasses indoors. I took a picture in my dorm that day that would launch a thousand online flings but that for then was an etched proof-of-life to myself. I’d made the long journey to get the Holy Grail and Jesus and his disciples were digging through the crates, not for bread or fish but for 80s hardcore.

“Well that’s the thing about Johnny Rotten, he’s maybe as energetic as Sigmund Freud or at least Fredric Jameson, still writing books into 90s and here I am taking off my dress now, without touching my chest,” one of them who was the record clerk for the day was explaining to a customer hear in the land beneath the mountain. A dragon coiled so tightly it was the size of a big cat purred in the corner.

I remember the day I bought this album, on an impromptu afternoon walk through gray rains to a record store tucked away quietly off the busy university thoroughfare. 40 year anniversary this year; it exceeded even my high initial expectations, it changed my life.

I’m trying National Novel Writing Month this November! Not sure if I’ll be able to get through the entire 50,000 word requirement, but I’m going try. Here’s chapter 1:

–

Culture is gravity. It’s leaden prose and inescapably smelly brass-spittoon takes about the must-seeness of anything we’d have seen anyway. No one can breezily and actively curate their own cool garage of cultural artifacts—grafting some little wings on to a personalized library whose collective pages beckon the air itself to stir them, to send them in a happy accident flying out of their spines like plague-locusts to be eventually silhouetted against Noah’s great rainbow—without first enduring an ambient phlegmy rant on the greatness of Kid A or James Joyce, or the inevitability of poptimism, or what Normal People—the noble unwashed Offline Masses, owners of impeccable taste whose baseness we can’t mention and whose correctness we don’t question—think about all this.

I’d tried to explain to Joseph—even before he went to Neo-Egypt after he’d dreamed another dream that’d make his brothers drift off into nightmares in which they imagined him as gay as a $3 bill with a coat the shape and color of a CD-ROM held under distant and now breath-warm mideast sun—how vinyl records work, not because he had any persuaded interest in them but because the filmic gravity of Taylor Swift had pulled him beyond the event horizon of even caring about listening to music anymore. He didn’t own a turntable, didn’t know the difference between analog and digital sound, had never seen a concert film, one day hadn’t even engaged with the clickbaity-ADHDy thought of abruptly, finally paying five-figures to watch some compelling content, live, with legions of outstretched phones. Now he sat with a hardened heart letting plaquey plague cultures infect him and make him so heavy with passivity and content consumption that he felt hot, in the way only people carrying around extra energy on their bodies can, with large heads and round bellies in sync with the planets and the different symphonic movements that Gustav Holst scored for each such galactic wanderer.

“So, how do you skip between tracks?”

“The needle and the—well you have to move the needle manually to where these outlines are—but the notion here is that you listen to the entire side—”

“Side??”

“Unlike digital media, vinyl has the potential for a firm stop or an infinite loop that’d make a programmer jealous by actually being intentional—literally going on mansplaining and manlaughing forever, without jumping between songs or requiring any action. Like the needle can be retracted once the side reaches its capacity, or it can dig in and go on forever in Sgt. Pepper-esque chuckles. Like, you have to get up and go pull that needle off, and it can feel like the band had murder in its heart for you, telling me to fuck off, go fuck yourself, etc.”

“Is there data encoded into the record, where does the volume come from?”

“Vinyl isn’t computerized, it’s all waveforms traced by a needle.”

“I miss computers already.”

Ahh, computers: How the fuck do they work? Well: Not by jabbing a needle into a sludge of recycled sea insects with enough force to give them all posthumous Hepatitis C, tracing inside their bodies their old outside flight patterns so precisely as to make sound airy enough to be thrown out of their ancient guts, across Pharaoh’s pre-parted Red Sea, and at last back to the surface like a slick blackened wet whale breaking the face of the waters with amplified desperation for a little air, a little life. Joseph was newly vi-curious, but later on Moses would hate records, hate the bequeathed sand settling in the music-occupied grooves, hated the vinyl revival of 2005, hated the thought of a stylus that when cast down into the oily bowels became a serpent whose hisses dazzled the ears in crackly low dynamic range.

Ohh, Joseph. Before he journeyed into Neo-Egypt he showed me his mouth aflame with chewing tobacco that made his cheeks look Cubist and his record reviews sound like smokily flattering press releases. They lived on AI-written and SEO-optimized pages whose vapors wafted over the web like ponies whose manes had just started getting good in the back, running so fast that they were all neon hair, all surface, when they loaded into view out of the nothingess of the New Ancient Google search field void and then bespoiled the landscape with their hooves pounding toward word-count Valhalla. Inshallah, 500 words more and I’ve hit the quota—my manager is in the control room right now, watching everything I type.

“No one except complete madmen misses computers, at least not the way I sort of miss those ponies of yours and the problems they caused. A real case of the causes being good but the problems being bad. I can’t read anymore about the ‘Top 5 Things Every Would-Be Exodus Traveler Needs’ or ‘7 Harsh Truths From Yahweh’s Mouth That’ll Make You A Better Person’ or ‘Pharaoh Says If You Have This One Insect In Your Home, Throw It Out Immediately.’ But I liked how you wrote them!”

“Well, I do miss computers. I’m an independent content consumer. That’s what I heard in a the latest episode of my favorite podcast, Parallel. I might not hang out hearing songs on the radio or watching reruns of The Basket Floats by the River on cartridge, but I have choice, damn it, I’ve got agency, and—thanks, while I’m doing this bit—I have a completely original style—fuck you, Harold Bloom, I invented the human—that can only be honed by watching everything in the Spotlight and What’s Hot rows of Netflix and recycling the verbiage of the first page of results I seee for “Euphoria review.”

“How do you feel about sex scenes in media?”

“I’m against them, no movie or TV show needs that because it distracts from the plot and from the ponies and from the—”

“And if something that’s ‘hot’ or ‘trending’ has it in them?”

“I need to say this, but you are too online, you’re quoting back takes on misinformation from that known plagiarist Cain at Buzzfeed and —”

“How can I be too online when I still listen to most my music on a disc player, as God himself intended. You were worried about skipping tracks on vinyl, right? Well did you know that CDs pioneered track indexing and that now that we’ve gone to streaming, some of that is getting lost again?”

“I care about skipping because although I like the first two tracks on 1989—”

“—and I remember you didn’t like anything after the first two books of the Bible, either, hello where is my digital audiobook skipping, is that anything?”

“CDs are so passé though, even Adam disliked it, and vinyl skip or no vinyl skip, well maybe that’s not important, I like having these records in a gallery to show people on my Zoom calls about how this client needs 10,000 more words that I’ll have to count out in increments of ten as I type after the contract is inked, and then pause for a 30-minute break to think about what it’d be like to do literally anything more fulfilling, like sticking my head inside a grand piano and giving a lecture on nationalism that really, uh, resonates with the audience, or about how, if this were all being done with pen and paper, such inhumane Pharaoh-mandated volume wouldn’t be practical.”

I’m zooming into someone’s space where there’s a painting visible in the background as a landscape for conversation, it’s of a man smoking a cigar and lifting a turntable stylus to play surely the most authentic music ever recorded, some backwoods country or synthpop made with real analog syntheiszers from the 1960s. Here’s my conversation snippet, later recorded as a lecture as we exited Neo-Egypt for good, or at least for a few millennia:

“When music moved away from CDs starting after Adam left Eden, vinyl was the new covenant. But like streaming with its vast array of so much content that it could never be consumed while staying biblically thin, vinyl is more of an idea than an instrument, meant to be admired more than enjoyed viscerally. You can’t skip around, you have to endure the entire side, like you’re being forced to watch the star soccer player thread his passes to inept torch carriers who could never hold the angel’s flaming sword, you have to tsk in forum thread-ese at how the low-end just isn’t as deep and the high-end just isn’t as bright.

But you know what’s high-quality and in a unit that’s realistically consumable for real human beings and real heroes? Actual CDs. CD albums also have digitally indexed tracks, and they can be shuffled, in ways that linear analog media such as LPs and cassette tapes can’t. Giving into the shuffle is liberating because there’s no more illusion of active curation, of being a bootstrapping tastemaker libertarian who recommends culture yet believes they’re above all its pervasive influence, a motivated detail-oriented self-starter who arranges everything as immaculately as a triple-washed résumé and like a robot HR department reading it, dings 99% of everything on it for not sounding as good as whatever they heard across an acoustically perfect greenhouse when they were 18—for not truly believing in the role.

Shuffling, though—doesn’t it go against what the artists intended for those albums? What if you applied similar logic to Genesis or Exodus or, Yahweh forbid, even Leviticus and read the verses in random order? “Ye shall eat the fat of the land, and darkness was on the face of the deep” sounds like cringe marketing for would-be Wegovy patients. Books, then, are less amenable than movies or music to such cut-and-paste logic, but according to the Parallel show hosts separting the art from the artist is imperative—indeed, maybe the point of all interpretation!—and shufflng does that. Yet some albums defy this anonymity, this freedom from responsibility that Joseph and the other critics imagine is possible when critiquing anything this way. There’s still an analog voice, some cigarette-touched vocal cords or lead-poisoned brain cells oozing like oil from a spill uncontrollable even by the most robust cloud-based IT solutions that bleed out to their end-users as faultless and blamless digital interfaces that aim to compute and control everything.

Apollo 18 was a huge influence on Moses, a revelation that got him to swear off vinyl and linearity forever (or at least three times), but Lumpy Gravy? It was his ticket to finding a that voice in the cloudy wilderness and deciding that the way out of Neo-Egypt was to build his own golden calf of a carefully curated collection that nevertheless yielded to the random gravity of culture, through divinely elected shuffling.

That oily sweat-tingling feeling from unexpected autumn warmth—when it’s hot out but oughta be cold, and your brain turns into a fruitful bough by a well of water for sweet-teeth—is dark liberation, a cheater’s affect that feels so righteous as you flaunt the sunglassed archers, the Agents of S.A.D.

Two screaming album covers for albums without much screaming on them

Some throwback listening 💿

Basking in the fall sunlight

Even my 🐈 enjoys Super Turrican: Director’s Cut, a restored genuine Super Nintendo game that’s bundled with the Analogue Super NT retro console.

Some cassette tape listening

“I’m thinking thin!”

In the 2000 film Requiem for a Dream, that’s the hopeful refrain from Sara Goldfarb (played extravagantly by Ellen Burstyn) as she embarks on a crash diet—black coffee, hard-boiled eggs, and half a grapefruit each morning—to lose 10 lbs in 10 days. The underlying goal (because there’s always one with dieting, no one diets for its own sake): Fit into an old red dress she wants to wear when she appears on television after winning a mail-in sweepstakes¹.

Spoiler alert for a 23-year old movie: She can’t stick to the diet and so she seeks medication to assist her weight loss. A doctor prescribes her a daily course of amphetamines, i.e., the diet pills du jour from when the story was set in the mid 20th century.

The results are stunning: She loses her 10 lbs and then some, but—shocker—that proves tough to sustain without increasing her dosage. Soon she’s psychotic, imagining the refrigerators talking to her and that the huckstery, infomercial-immersed host of the show she delusionally thinks she’ll be on is in her living room alongside her fantasized thin red self², mocking the messiness of her Brighton Beach apartment. Eventually she ends up virtually vegetative.

Her plot line, more so than the other three that involve three other characters’ struggles with heroin, is what makes Requiem for Dream linger³ in my mind. Rarely does any quasi-mainstream⁴ movie portray diet culture for what it really is—a money-making cult that drives its followers literally insane while destroying their health.

The notions that weight loss is A) desirable for health reasons and B) sustainable have no roots in scientific evidence.⁵ Any substantial weight loss is regained and then some in 95% of people. This inevitable weight cycling is itself far more provably harmful than being “obese”⁶—in other words, by telling people to diet, doctors are essentially prescribing the thing they’re nominally trying to prevent.

Medications for weight loss have a horrible track record. I mean, look at the fucking tables in this paper—and this was before the disastrous fen-phen cocktail of the 90s. As with the destructive baldness medication Propecia, weight-loss meds are pushed on the desperate public with zeal despite their concerning side-effect profiles⁷ and their relatively meager benefits⁸. I wouldn’t trust Wegovy et al. at all given the history and the culture that made them.

The weight loss imperative thrust on “obese” patients is an aesthetic and political concern—“fat people are disgusting,” more or less—masquerading as a medical diagnosis. And its costs are immense, not just financially but also in terms of the effects on people’s physical and mental health’s and their enjoyment of life. Perfectly good and nutritious food gets branded as “sinful,” “a guilty pleasure,” or part of a “cheat day/meal.” There’s thus a religious, Puritanical thrust to the dieting madness.

And for what? There’s no reward on the other side except for short-term weight loss that’ll be reversed, people who’ll tell you look great even if your weight loss was the result of some illness (the easiest way by far to lose weight, and a hint at how unhealthy it is), and more madness counting calories and going slowly mad in your home like Sara Goldfarb.

---

1. She never hears back about this contest. ↩︎

2. This reminded me in the imagery of the Laurent Garnier song “The Man with the Red Face.” ↩︎

3. The Cranberries? Anyone? ↩︎

4. It was rated NC-17 but it’s by Darren Aronofksy, a major director who also did the awful The Whale. ↩︎

5. On this point I recommend The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos. ↩︎

6. “Obese” is not a real disease. Its only indicator—BMI—is a pseudoscientific formula made upby a literal astrologer. I recommend What’s Wrong With Fat? by Abigail Saguy on how the “obesity epidemic” was manufactured from whole cloth in the 1990s. ↩︎

7. Propecia can cause irreversible damage to the male reproductive system. Wegovy can damage the thyroid, among other effects. Both come with an FDA “black box” warning. ↩︎

8. Yes, even the “miracle” new diet injections plateau and reverse after a while. ↩︎

There’s so many reasons to hate “obesity” discourse, including how it makes eating less fun by assigning a quasi-religious moralism—and from people who’d never consider themselves religious fanatics—to it. Yes, tell me more about how something is “sinful,” “empty,” “guilty,” or “cheating.”

Collection of Super Famicom games

Amazing that Tactics Ogre came out in 1995 for the Super Famicom. The depth of its gameplay is way beyond anything else on the system or on many more “advanced” systems, too. The Reborn remaster spruces it up, but it’s still mostly the same basic 28 year old game underneath, and that’s incredible.

This morning’s listening:

Unless you exert conscious effort, you’ll deem the music of your youth as the “greatest” ever. Relatedly, music that others see as “great,” but that you aren’t nostalgic for, can seem mystifying—that’s happening to me with the current anniversary tours for The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie.

There’s a lot of media hype about Wegovy that doesn’t grapple with how at its core the drug seems to induce the same harmful weight cycling as every other miracle weight-loss “cure.”

Three versions of Pink by Boris:

• 2006 🇺🇸 CD
• 2006 🇺🇸 LP (different sequence, longer versions of 3 songs)
• 2016 deluxe 🇺🇸 CD (extra disc of bonus songs, 🇯🇵 cover art)

The Analogue Pocket has 100x (not a typo) the resolution of a Nintendo Game Boy Color (GBC). Here’s the title screen for the rare GBC title Metal Gear Solid, running off the original cart on the system.

Sometime in the mid 1990s, I saw it for the first time—the bumper sticker reading “Ear X-Tacy,” on a car in my school parking lot. That “X” had the mystique of the forbidden, at a time when deep, reflective narratives about Gen-X were widespread, and possibly when Elon Musk was already running the original X.com¹. “X” still signified coolness and mystery.

The reality behind this “X” was straightforward but thrilling—Ear-X-Tacy was a vast, single-location record store in Louisville, KY, predominantly stocked with CDs² that by the time I visited it with my mom a few years later had also gone big into a little new hotness called DVDs. It even carried vinyl, at a time when that format was at its nadir, right before its mid-2000s revival.

Shopping in the physical world

Shopping for music in physical stores like that one is an alien experience for most people under 30. It required immense time and literal energy—i.e., the gas to drive miles away—to go to Ear-X-Tacy, and as such couldn’t come close to the current efficiency of just searching a title in Apple Music and clicking the “+” button.

There’s no space for its mass comeback, and I doubt I’d trade the status quo for it. It’s easy to romanticize it now (and I will in a bit), but the requisite effort is what Don DeLillo might call a “collapsible fact”—something painful (in this case, the inconvenience and expense of CD shopping) that nevertheless gets tucked away as a form of self-defense, only to be recalled (uncollapsed, as it were) later when your nostalgia and/or idealism eventually wears off.

But hunting for CDs did feel challenging and visceral, because you had so much music (more than you could ever get through if you listened nonstop for a month³) at your fingertips as real physical objects, and yet simultaneously you had to work within the sharp physical constraints of the store itself. The experience was unique, such that, even now as a little treat to my nostalgia, I like to go to the Tower Records in Shibuya almost every winter to hunt through its massive rows of special edition Japan CDs⁴. It’s almost like going back to the mid 2000s again, the twilight of my frequent record-buying experience.

Though it was “only” ~15 years ago, those times seem even more distant than events from much earlier, I suppose because they were so thoroughly physical in away that no longer remotely resembles modern music consumption:

• I’d look up record reviews on Web 1.0 sites such as warr.org. Imagine—reading the opinions of professional critics!
• I’d write down the ones I wanted I to look for on a piece of printer paper. Paper! With pencils and maybe even pens!
• I’d either go with my mom on the drive to Ear-X-Tacy or, if I was in college, walk a ways to the Newbury Comics at a mall near campus. I had to leave the house!
• I’d finger through the CD rows, sometimes but often not finding what I’d been looking for, but also finding things I hadn’t thought of but seemed appealing. Not everything was available on-demand!
• I’d take the discs back to my room (or dorm) and use my desktop PC to rip them into iTunes and then load them onto my iPod. There was no “cloud”!

It took effort, and as painful as it often was, finding something rewarding and having it in your hands was exhilarating—a tangible win in a well-defined game with clear boundaries.

The Zappa conundrum

The artist who dominated those peak CD buying years was one who had at best a contentious and at worst a hostile relationship to the format—Frank Zappa. Record stores almost always organized their collections alphabetically by artist’s surname, so I built muscle memory⁵ to go to the end of the line and find the day’s almost always massive sample of Zappa’s endless discography.

They’d often have his most popular work—We’re Only In It For The Money, Apostrophe, Freak Out!—alongside some daunting (and expensive) multi-disc works such as Läther and Shut Up N’ Play Your Guitar, and lots of releases you’d probably never even heard of despite your preliminary research, such as Wazoo, a live album containing some but not all material from the much better-known The Grand Wazoo studio album.

Finding a worthwhile⁶ Zappa release took even more work, but had an even greater reward, than any artist I can recall, not just because there’s a huge gap between his best and worst work, or because he released seemingly 459 albums, but also because in the pre-digital panopticon, pre-smartphone era, it wasn’t always easy to know you’d got the right version of any given album.

Here’s where Zappa’s aforementioned contentious relationship toward the CD comes back in play. When CDs became commercially available in the 1980s. Zappa—like all other major artists of the album era—began remastering many of his LPs. But he went further: He actually re-edited and heavily remixed the recordings, making many of them sound drastically different from the vinyl originals:

• We’re Only In It For The Money had all of its original drum and bass tracks replaced with new recordings that sound badly out of step with the other instrumentation. It also has its censored obscenities restored. The initial CD was different from both the stereo and mono vinyl releases, which were also substantially different from one another.
• Hot Rats had one of this tracks, “The Gumbo Variations,” lengthened by 4 minutes, and its most famous piece, “Willie the Pimp,” re-edited with what sounds like a totally different guitar solo.
• Unless you’d snatched up and held into the original 8-track cartridge of Lumpy Gravy in 1967 when it got recalled, every version thereafter until 2009 was the vastly inferior 1968 re-edit with lots of irritating dialogue added. There was also another version that “punched up” that 1968 mix with re-recorded bass and drums!

There’s way more along those lines. Indeed, the endless possibilities opened up by the CD format—longer run times and greater dynamic range ⁶, mainly—seemed to overwhelm Zappa, giving him pretext to indulge his tendency to fiddle. Sometimes, limits are good!

I was lucky to walk out of Ear-X-Tacy in spring 2005 with a good mix (the 1995 CD) of We’re Only In It For The Money, I slipped it into a CD player while riding through a hilly stretch between Nelson and Washington Counties in Kentucky, and added it to my iPod later that day. But I also got a “bad” (to some people) mix (the 1987 CD) of Hot Rats and wouldn’t hear the “good” vinyl mix for years (FWIW, I think the CD sounds better).

Physical memories

Those two discs were the soundtrack to my 2005 summer—the drums of “Mom and Dad” echoing in my head while I assembled cars door panels in a factory, the squawking saxophone of “The Gumbo Variations” playing from the car stereo on our road-trips to Rhode Island. I was so careful with them because even then they seemed to embody, in their physical form, a time and place I could literally touch.

Sadly, I lost my Hot Rats disc in a flood this year and only barely saved the We’re Only In It For The Money one and have had to clean it; I think it may still be usable. Either one’s tracks—and all their alternate Zappa remixes, too—are of course still available on every streaming service, but not those exact tracks, on those exact discs, as physical links to distinct memories, and as manifestations of what versions of those albums were deemed the “right” ones at that historical juncture. That’s something that feels like a unique product of the “music store” era, and one that’s literally being washed away.

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1. The old X dot com was an online bank that merged with Confinity to make PayPal. ↩︎

2. They even had a Super Audio CD (SACD) section. SACD was a format that required special playback equipment and offered only modest improvements over regular CDs, most importantly the ability to carry up to 6 channels of audio instead of just stereo. But basically nothing except the PlayStation 3 and some Blu-ray players offered a practical way to play them over a good sound system. ↩︎

3. I told a doctor that I had a month plus of music on my iPod in 2008 and I’m pretty sure that even now I haven’t listened to some of the songs in that batch. ↩︎

4. In Japan, CDs often have extra tracks or even extra discs exclusive to the country. ↩︎

5. I typo’d this as “music memory,” and almost left it. ↩︎

6. It’s not an exaggeration to say that with some of Zappa’s worst work, like the 1968 mix of Lumpy Gravy most people couldn’t endure even a single playthrough. ↩︎

Don DeLillo, on the last day of summer in Underworld: “It is all part of the same thing, the feeling of some collapsible fact that’s folded up and put away and the school gloom that traces back for decades—the last laden day of summer vacation when the range of play tapers to a screwturn.”

Like a 🐅 camouflaged in the jungle

Some ☕️ and 🌈