Add Category
I am sitting cross-legged on the living room rug with teetering towers of CDs all around me. I imagine the scene looks like a miniature version of the Surfers Paradise skyline with King Kong plonked in the middle. The time has come, you see, to reclaim the space currently occupied in the drawers of our typically enormous entertainment unit by hundreds of CDs.
Surrounded by teetering towers of CDs, the scene looks like a skyline with King Kong in the middle. Illustration by Simon Letch.
Mostly in bulky jewel cases, they date back to the inception of the format in 1982. I like to think I'm not sentimental. I had zero reluctance when it came to dumping cassettes, with their inevitable cascades of tape leakage that could only be painstakingly wound back with a pencil, and their complete inability to maintain pitch stability in hot cars. Out they went, and with them the distantly romantic notion of the "mixtape", now easily superseded by the digital playlist.
Same with vinyl, in spite of what is optimistically termed the revival. Too big, too easily damaged. Sure, they sound far better than CDs but only if you treat them like control rods in a nuclear power station, polish them before and after you play them, and return them to their sleeves with meticulous care. I gave some away. The ones so scratched that they offered the tell-tale clicks, pops and explosions of white noise that sound just like someone frying an egg over the music, went to the dump.
And now, the jig is all but up for CDs. Digital streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music dish up almost any song or album title you can think of. Or simply speak into the magic ears of Siri, Google or Alexa, and your request will play instantly.
When entire music libraries can be carried on phones, what is the point of a vast CD collection? Besides, like most urban dwellers we need the drawer space for the more recent accoutrements of the digital age: power cables and adaptors of every sort, chargers for phones and tablets, and, thanks to the tech giants' collective obsession with making things ever thinner, external CD drives, external hard drives and, quite soon, surely, external brains.