Gone Are The Days

It was just the other day when the depressing factor set in that there are no more real record stores in existance.  I've known this for quite some time, obviously, but the concept recently hit me hard.  I'm not talking old vinyl shops...they still exist, I know.  And we love vinyl.  But that's more of a vintagey fun thing...and only certain albums do we want to hear all scratchy and retro and beautiful sounding. 

I'm talking CD's...I want to sift through them in those annoying plastic security casings.  I want to see the artwork on the covers.  And when I make the purchase, I want to flip through the booklet and read all the credits.  Yes, I'm that girl.

One of my first (and all-time favorite jobs to this day) was at a record store.  Sure, it was in a mall, but it counted.  Now I could have done without the cassettes (thankfully they cycled out during my time there), but there was just something therapuetic about digging through those bins, shifting rows and rows of CD's so that they were evenly distributed amongst the rows...and perfectly alphabatized.  I could tell you what was on the cover of any record that streeted between the years of '94 and '98.  And what track was my favorite.  I could tell you which underground records that no one would've known about otherwise that I sold out in a day because I played them.  Because they were awesome.  And because people listened.

(Not because they were in the Top 10 or because they made it on to some ridiculous TV show that is more all about making money than good music.)

I could also tell you which promo records I would dig out of the "junk" bin because no one else wanted them.  And which ones turned into the Alanis Morrisette's of the bunch.  I could also go on and on about which albums (particularly the Mariah Carey and Harry Connick, Jr. Christmas albums) that I heard probably close to 2,000 times and yet they just kept. on. Playing. Selling. 

Mind you, this was all before we had emails, cell phones and laptops in every room of our house.  Before the digital revolution really kicked in and we Googled our lives away.  Back when life was easier.  (Yes, I'm currently emailing and googling on my laptop, while texting on my cell phone.)

Now we all sit on our a$$es, burning our eyeballs out on our screens, day in and day out.  Instead of a fun day out looking through CD upon CD...I spend my time in scanning iTunes and Amazon for the latest and greatest.  Nothing is tangible anymore.  Without it being tangible, it doesn't even seem real.  What happens when your computer crashes...or when someone rips off your iPod?  It's like the music you knew and loved in that particular time period of your life never existed.  Music becomes disposable.  It's memories lost.

I want hard copies, people.  I want to dig through a pile of old CD's one day and smile (or cry) at the memories gone by.  And pass them on to the generations to come.  How would we ever know how awesome Elvis or The Beatles or Led Zeppelin or hell, even Nirvana was without the actual medium being passed down to us somehow, someway?  

Quite simply, we wouldn't.  And if we didn't know what we knew now, neither would our favorite current bands know what they know and perhaps, they would never be.  And that, my friends, would really suck.