![]() It was a run very few bands have matched, and even though I can summon all the songs on these eight nigh-on perfect albums from memory in the blink of an eye, sometimes you need to be able to pull one off the shelf and just hold it in your hands. And it will fit just fine in a tiny home. Scratched and dinged as it is, it means more to me than all the aluminum coasters in the world. After some emotional turmoil, I resigned myself to being without it - until, one hot day last summer, as if guided by a divine hand, I came across a copy lying flat on a blanket at a St-Viateur sidewalk sale and purchased it for the princely sum of one dollar. As sometimes happens, though, it was somehow lost in the move. The one album I brought with me was the one I couldn’t bear the thought of being without - a record that played a central part in firing up my love of music, by the first musician I ever saw in concert: Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Twenty-odd years ago, on moving from Edmonton to Montreal, I chose not to incur the cost of shipping my 1,000-plus records across the country instead, I bequeathed them to a nephew unique among my many nieces and nephews in having expressed an interest in them. But I do feel the need to own one particular long-playing vinyl record. ![]() Music means as much to me as it ever has, but with few exceptions (see sidebar) I don’t feel the need to own it on compact disc anymore. If Samuel Beckett were still with us and writing plays, this would be his turf. The few items that might fetch you an attractive price are the very ones you most likely want to keep. Multiply that experience by approximately infinity, and you’ll have some sense of what’s ahead for anyone trying to wring significant resale value out of their unwanted CDs. I’d have thought Modest Mouse might still cling to some cachet, for example, but apparently not: in my quest to unload four of their albums a few months ago, they were rejected outright by every reputable outlet in the city. ![]() Similar small heartbreaks unfold constantly in the used CD realm. Working in a used bookstore, it was part of my job to gently break it to people that their 1985 Encyclopaedia Britannica set (slight water damage, just one volume missing) was not only not going to be their nest egg, but was literally no longer worth the paper it was printed on. Article contentĪs for trying to sell my CDs, well, I’ve been on both sides of the counter for that poignant little ritual. ![]() This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. How many people even still keep a CD player anywhere other than in a neglected corner of their garage? At a certain point, you may find yourself entertaining conceptual thought exercises out loud: Is a CD that never gets played just a tree falling in an unpopulated forest? Is a box set that never gets opened a kind of musical mini-coffin? They’re essentially unlovable aluminum coasters in uninspiring packaging, rapidly approaching obsolescence as a form, with no sign that they’ll attain serious collectibility any time soon. They don’t age in interesting, organic ways. I want to be his good friend.”) As physical objects, they are utterly unlike their vinyl predecessors in that they inspire little or no loyalty or sentimentality. Why exactly were these CDs, barely touched since my purchase of an iPod Classic nearly a decade ago (I joined the MP3 revolution a good few years after all my friends), still taking up space in my home? Was I keeping them around to bolster my own identity? To impress visitors? (“Hey, this guy has almost every Prefab Sprout album. So it came to pass this year that, fuelled by visions of tiny homes and thoughts of all the ruinous excesses of late-capitalist consumer culture, I began asking myself some blunt questions. albums is utterly dispensable, Ian McGillis writes. Article content Unlike the Beatles themselves, the first-generation CD issue of their U.K. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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