Entry for 1st November, 2008 - Modern Life is Rubbish

I am experimenting with buying music from iTunes instead of on CD. Along woith my composting, this is one little thing that I am trying to do for the environment.
I have to say that I hate it. Since the age of about thirteen, one of the greatest pleasures that I think I have ever had is going to a record shop, browsing the racks and walking home with some new music lying latent in a plastic bag.
And the buying of it wasn’t the end of the pleasure. Oh no. You still had year of sheer bliss ahead. I’m not talking about listening to the stuff of course. Huh – if you want to listen to music, all you need to do is turn on the radio. That isn’t the point.
The point of music is music collections. It always has been. Since I was a teenager, everyone has been defined by their music collections. You can tell whether a person is serious or not by the number of albums (or CDs nowadays) on their shelves. You can tell whether they are a person of weight and merit, simply from the fact that they have chosen to spend a substantial part of their life accumulating records. If they haven’t bothered to do this, then they are the sort of person who is not worth bothering about.
Unless they are a girl of course. Girls are exempt from record collecting. Firstly, their taste is crap. Secondly, they purpose of girls is to be impressed by your record collection. It would just not do if they had better taste than you. (And here I really do mean you. It is not possible to have better musical taste than me).
Anyway. The collection of music is important. It is not the same collecting it on a computer. It is rubbish. A track list on a file buried deep in a hard drive does not have anything approaching the thrill of shelves upon shelves of neatly stacked records. It does not make your heart beat faster. It does not impress your mates.
Modern life is indeed rubbish.