I don't remember when I bought my first copy of Ill Communication by the Beastie Boys. It might have been a gift, but with the large quantity of swear words it contains, I doubt by parents would have bought it for me. I do know that by the fall of 1997 I had bought at least four copies because the first few had met their demise in ways directly related to the excessively high amount of play time they were subjected to: some broke, some got scratched, some were lost. I had other CD's, good ones, but there was only one in my car's CD player or in my Sony Discman (look it up, kids) at ALL times.
I have a couple of homemade, burned CD copies floating around somewhere; not that it matters though. I have a digital copy on both of my computers (desktop and laptop), my cellphone, on my Amazon Cloud Player, and Google Music, plus you can go to the official website and listen to the whole album plus bonus tracks there for free. CD's are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Just like records, eight tracks, and audio cassettes, a new technology is slowly taking over and will soon force the CD into the "retro" category and only hipsters with their tight pants, black rimmed glasses and iPhones will care about them. And that's fine (not the hipster part, NO ONE deserves a fate in which those brats are the only ones who will pay attention to them. But the advancement of technology part is fine). It's the way of the world.
But as I was sitting at work listening to what is (and after seventeen years, I think it's safe to say) always will be my favorite album, I started thinking about how I am a member of the last generation that will remember the CD.
And I don't mean literally remember; all current and future generations will have Google and Wikipedia and, therefore, the ability to look up "Compact Disc". What I mean is that the concept of a store that exists only for the sale of CD's is already a thing of the past. CD players that you carry around (or better yet clip to your belt) are long gone. It won't be long until it's considered old-fashioned to have a CD player in your car now that cars are coming with auxiliary inputs, hard drives, and USB ports. Hell, I saw a commercial for a car with Pandora installed in the on-board, touch screen computer in the middle of the dashboard. Internet radio, in the car. What I mean is that we (myself and people my age) are the tail end of the last cohort that will really remember the CD experience.
I remember buying a CD for $20 or more only to find out that the only song worth a crap on the whole album was the one I had heard on the radio. But with iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store, you only pay for the songs you want so you don't have that disappointment. Plus, you can preview the songs right there on the website before you buy.
I remember the sinking feeling I used to get when a CD would skip. I would flip it over to find a deep, irreparable scratch right through it. And you could try and fix it, but it never worked. They sold machines that claimed to do the job, someone told me to use mayonnaise once, but the end result was always the same: shelling out another $20 for a new one. MP3's don't scratch, or wear out.
I remember CD books littering the floorboards of every car of every person I knew. You could flip through a book of 50 albums and still only find a handful of songs worth listening to. Now we just shuffle the iPod.
I remember reading the lyrics on the liner notes to try and figure out what the hell they were saying. Now we just Google it.
So, as I'm sitting here, forcing you to reminisce with me and listing to what is, and will continue to be my favorite album in crystal clear digital MP3 streaming over the internet, I can't help but think about all the fun I had as a dumb, teenage kid driving around town worrying about stupid little things that seemed to be so huge at the time, how nothing was more important than spending time with my friends, wondering about what the future was going to be like, looking forward to the time when I was all grown up and how this CD was the soundtrack for it all.
