We always welcome Cullen's insights and are enthused to have a contribution in which he reflects upon music thru this unique editorial lens.
My prime CD-buying years were roughly 1998-2008 (ages 13-23). I have no accurate record of how many CDs I purchased, stole, traded or was gifted during the decade in question, but today I still have approximately 180. Those 180 CDs will be the subjects of this series.
In 2022 I intend to listen to each CD one by one &, to the extent that I can stay on schedule, write about them every other day. If all goes according to plan, I'll make my way through all of them by the end of the year. Some of these albums I haven't listened to in years. Some of them I know as intimately as my own heartbeat. Some of them I've written about before. It's possible that one or two I've never actually heard all the way through. For some, I'm not sure why I bought them in the first place.
It just so happens that my heyday of CD buying lined up almost exactly with the heyday of file sharing. I pirated & burned a roughly equal number of CDs to those I purchased. There were various reasons to buy a CD rather than bootleg it, & the decision usually had nothing to do with how much I cherished the music. Some of my favorite albums--the most formative to my music taste--will not appear in this series. If there is enough interest, & if I'm not burned out, maybe I'll do the bootlegs in 2023.
As I said, there were many reasons to buy rather than pirate. Chief among these was my desire to own a physical object, to hold the artwork in my hand, to read the liner notes & observe the layout & design choices. Now more than ever, they remain artifacts of that heady time of musical discovery, of tastes forming, of identity forming with them.
Methodology
I will choose the albums in random order. There will be no chronology or genre grouping or any other comprehensible scheme. I will randomly select each album moments before I sit down to listen to it. I do not want time to prepare.
My attention span isn't what it used to be in the pre-cyborg smartphone days. (Is anybody's?) With this project I want to revive the art of the deep listen. To the extent that I can, I will listen to each album in full in a single sitting (I may give myself some grace in the case of double albums), without distractions. I will only listen to the physical CD that I own. No streams, no downloads, no rips. From the original optical disc to my ears. Since I do not have a working CD player in my car, this means that the listening will be done on my home stereo, pretty much exclusively. The only things I will allow myself to look at while listening will be the CD's insert & my own notes.
I will write my responses (I bristle at the idea of calling them "reviews") with regard to neither journalistic & critical integrity nor stylistic consistency. Some writeups may be stream of consciousness, some may be sociological, some may read like memoir. I will endeavor to discuss the music more than I discuss myself, but we'll see how that goes. I really like writing about myself. I promise not to get bogged down in crusty old-head-yells-at-cloud-ism, to wit:
Once upon a time, recorded music came out of physical objects. It wasn't plucked from the air, & you didn't have fingertip access to everything ever recorded. You bought, borrowed, traded or stole an object, put it into a device, & pressed play. It wasn't better or worse than what we have today, but it was different. A different kind of media demands a different kind of listening & a different kind of writing. At best, maybe I'll write something worth reading about the intersection of culture, pop culture, art, biography, and the passage of time. At worst, I'll get to revisit lots of good music. I hope you join me tomorrow for the first installment.
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