I took my CD collection to the record store the other day.
It took a while to get through the doors.
To be honest, the box was heavy, and I was by myself, and the door wouldn’t open properly. There were physical strains accompanying the mental ones. But, yeah. I’ll admit. It was kind of hard.
For a little while, at least.
It wasn’t so much that I was selling the CDs – after all, they’d sat in our basement for a full year without so much as a peep, and before that they had been pushed to the attic where they rarely saw human contact – but that it felt so irreversible.
Over 1000 albums. Stacked, alphabetized, moved twice, organized and reorganized. A representation of two people’s musical tastes; a chronicle of over 15 years of changes and favorites and succumbing to pressure.
And then, I turned around and left. The box sat on the counter. I’d hoped for the best. They were literally out of my hands.
At some point over the past few months, a string of nostalgia snapped. The notion of holding onto a physical representation of an abstract sense became ridiculous. The music wasn’t on those CDs – it was in the air, in my ears and (oh, man, here comes the sap) IN MY HEART.
(Coincidentally, it is on our computer, too.)
When I shifted my view of music from something that you hold and collect to something you listen to and enjoy and allow to run free, I understood I had to move. To unload the discs while I still could, while someone else was still interested in buying them, before others came to the same realization: that holding on to CDs – especially if they’re already stored on a computer and an iPod or whatever it is you store your music on these days – has become as antiquated as cassette tapes and 8-tracks.
Maybe you’ve already done this. Maybe you progressed faster than I did.
Maybe. Then again, maybe you’re in the same place I was. If so, take it from me – a former CD junkie:
Your music is not tied to those discs. You can let them go.
It’s hard to let go, but it’s so worth it…
Some day in the future, perhaps all of our possessions will fit a thumb sized USB thingy :)
Good for you!
i’m holding on to my cd collection mostly for my kids when they get older. i think that there will always be something inherently cool about thumbing through music from a different age then the one you currently live in. it’s the same feeling we got when we found our parents record collections when we were kids.
besides music will be in pill form by the time they’re our age, so it’ll be nice to show them that albums used to be something you could hold and read and look at, as well as listen to.
and for the love of god vilhauer BACK UP YOUR MUSIC COLLECTION!!! if your hard drive goes out or your ipods make a frowny face you will be screwed! and then you’ll be nostalgic because something will be lost forever.
Dude, if both of those things happen at the same time, something’s telling me I probably deserved to lose it all.
Don’t worry. I’ve got everything backed up to before we moved. I might lose some new stuff, but I’ll still have the old stuff.
I’ve gone through a couple CD purges myself. I’ve found about a dozen albums that I just can’t get rid of. Some are special editions, but some are just precious.
Think of it this way: now someone else gets a chance to discover those albums for themselves. You may have changed some young person’s life forever IN HIS OR HER HEART.
I kept a few, to be honest.
It worked out well, actually – the ones I am most attached to were, not surprisingly, the most scratched and unsellable.