Cheapening the thrill

Unlike some of you who are reading this, I remember very well what life was like before the Internet. I remember gathering twigs for kindling and knocking two flint stones together to make sparks so that we had a fire to cook the deer we had hunted with longbows that same day. OK, I don't really remember that, but looking back, it feels like with music, the change really is that drastic. Buying music used to be an event. Every time I bought a CD, I would carefully read through the lyrics and study the artwork as I listened to it for the first time, taking note of many details that still haven't left me. For example, who doesn't remember Kurt Cobain saying he got so high he scratched till he bled, especially when it was writing in wavy bubble letters on the inside of Nirvana's classic album, "Nevermind." I remember listening to X107 and Q104.3 before they changed formats, most of the time with headphones on late at night. Most of the time it wasn't too impressive, but every now and then the sound coming through those outdated speakers was a revelation. There's nothing quite like hearing a song for the first time and knowing that it's IT, and everything else stops until that song ends. There were times when the sound was pure and monumental; it removed both the past and future, leaving me completely in the moment. Afterwards, I was left with little to no choice but to buy the album, because after all, how else was I going to get it. By the time I got to college in 2000, burned CDs were everywhere, Napster reigned supreme, and I had more music than I knew what to do with. Suddenly, I had thousands of songs by hundreds of bands on my computer, available whenever I chose to listen to it, and strangely, sometimes it took years to get around to it. I still haven't listened to some of those bands, at least not for more than 20 seconds. Did my passion for music decrease between those times? It didn't decrease substantially. Why was I so apathetic to all the music right at my fingertips? Maybe it's simply because it's just too much to take in all at once, and if you didn't pay anything for it anyway, who cares? Without the tangible object, and the art that accompanies the music, the music itself seems cheaper, and makes it easier to discard or ignore. Recently, thousands of songs just somehow found their way into my lap, and logically I should've been doing naked cartwheels in my apartment for the next week out of the pure joy of having so much music for free. That didn't happen, which is good for the neighbors, but a bad sign for the future of music. The idea of buying a CD and not listening to it was absurd when I was younger, and for good reason: way too much blood, sweat and tears goes into something like that for it to be flat-out ignored.

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