today: 3.25.99
every day

i joined the columbia house cd club recently. i think i was feeling depressed (i must have been feeling depressed -- volunteering for a product/marketing relationship of this nature can only mean my life was missing something very important that i typically convinced myself i could plug up with some overstock cds) and i think i also fancied the idea of receiving 14 albums that i probably used to own in my pre-cd music collecting youth and never liked enough to purchase on crossover media, but thought would nonetheless round out my collection nicely. if you listen to a lot of music -- i think i do -- then you can assure yourself that ordering cds through a clearinghouse like columbia is the only way to justify nostalgia purchases that you will certainly never listen to (chances are your relationship with these albums is pretty much over but sometimes, when you're feeling like you've gone horribly long somewhere, you might write them a letter or call their mom for their latest phone number in an effort to retrace the fouled-up steps of your life to a better time).

honestly, the process of ordering these cds was much more gratifying than actually owning them again. so many sense-memory triggers were fired as i clicked through their vast library of unwanted titles ("oh, should i grab COMBAT ROCK? it's only 1/14th of a penny.")

so now i'm sitting around with a landfill-worthy pile of dated eighties rock albums (or worse -- i actually ordered the X 2-cd greatest hits collection because my love for them is too limited to fret over the classic credibility dilema of purchasing a collection over individual albums. again, if you listen to a lot of music you will understand the snobbery of buying 5 albums by some band over buying the greatest hits album with the only 5 songs you like by that band. and if you don't understand this level of myopic consumption, bless you and your rolling stones HOT ROCKS collection. truthfully, when you are used to listening to one kinda music for a really long time and you can suspend personal issues surrounding sullying your record collection with a bunch of unfeeling greatest hits compilations, places like columbia house will help you with a selection of greatest hits by bands you know you SHOULD like but don't yet know if you DO like. Willie Nelson? Booker T and the MGs? The Dramatics? The Kelly Family?)

which reminds me: there are some bands that i think ONLY have greatest hits collections. if not, i definitely don't know anyone with a single studio album by these artists. the king of all greatest hits bands is, i think, the steve miller band. does anyone own a steve miller studio album? no. but for some reason there are about 30 million people who rock barbecue-hard to that greatest album. did you know that steve miller has over 15 studio albums? damn, maurice, that's a lot of PRICE BREAK stickers to distribute internationally.

there's a great, friendly record store in manhattan called OTHER MUSIC (i'm a record store name-dropping fool!!). while i have no documented proof to support my theory, i have always assumed they gave themselves that name based on the columbia house form that asks you which genre of music you listen to most frequently. everyone who fancies himself just a little too cool for direct marketing has the opportunity to check a box labeled "other". OTHER MUSIC opened right around the corner from TOWER RECORDS which some may have regarded as economic suicide but which i've always thought was the coolest meek-shall-inherit move they could have ever made. i love OTHER but it makes me feel like a bit of a square because i often find myself with a pile of jingly, maudlin american indie pop while all the serious music nerds (the ones who wear earplugs no matter what band they are watching perform) politely rummage through antiseptic-sounding electronic and ambient artist selections such as ANDROID GHOSTE or SUBDIVIDED RADIOISOTOPE BOMBARDMENTS.

(i'm double-square for mocking electronic music but i guess i'd take a sad smog song with words like "i was raised in a pit of snakes/blink your eyes i was raised on cake" over amon tobin's explorations in meter any old stinking day.)

(now i'm triple-square for defending my double-squareness. that's the curse of my generation: can't do anything, can't say anything without an accompanying analysis. makes listening to my brand new copy of the replacements' TIM a whole lot less fun.)

prequel | sequel