My family and I finally cleaned out my mother’s storage locker this past summer. She’s still living but in a long-term care facility for the foreseeable future, so hasn’t had, and won’t have need or for pretty much any of the stored material. And among the many (many, many) old school items saved there (much to the joy of my teen, who immediately claimed numerous video players and other old tech), was a collection of several dozen vinyl albums.
We don’t have a record player, so what to do with the albums became a question. Selling them seemed the most practical thing to do. But we didn’t know where to begin with searching for what a record was worth how much in what shape, let alone how to sell them once/if that was ever determined.
Thanks to just casually discussing the issue with friends, we were connected with a friend’s friend who is a big record fan and lives on the other side of the city. I called him and we clicked right away, talking for well over an hour about initially albums and music but also a wide variety of other things. We met up a couple of days later and he was having a blast flipping through these records. Days of scrutinizing later, he said he’d take all of them. He wanted ten of them for his own collection and will likely sell the bulk of the rest of it during an annual street sale he’s made a name for himself doing for the last decade or so. Precisely the kind of thing we were hoping would happen, to find the vinyl another home to bring others some joy. We were happy to let him buy the whole lot. (Having said that, my wife did make a belated request for him to put aside Dark Side of the Moon for us to keep, just because.)
But it was after that first meeting that I noticed an interesting, related thing.
I was driving home, and the oddness of almost a total lack of David Bowie albums among my mother’s vinyl collection struck me. My parents were fans, and I was a fan during Bowie’s 80s albums so would’ve considered getting something, but we didn’t have so much as one in the collection. And then thinking of Bowie, I had the urge to listen to him. I used the voice command on my phone — drive safely, kids! — to ask for some best of Bowie music collection to play. I listened to a couple of songs, and what I found was that I was hearing… yes, familiar music, but the songs weren’t quite what I remembered them being. Some instruments were more up front, some more muted. It all sounded good (I mean, it’s Bowie), but just… different. As I sat in stalled, bumper-to-bumper traffic anyway, I snuck a quick look at the phone and it confirmed that it was playing a Remastered version of each of the songs I’d been hearing. So I wasn’t wrong about them sounding like slightly different versions of the original studio versions I was used to hearing.
When I got home, still needing that audio itch scratched, I did a deeper dive through Bowie albums on Apple Music, the streaming service we use just by nature of it being included in payments we’re already making to Apple anyway. And what I found was both surprising and disappointing:
Heroes (2017 Remaster)
Starman (2012 Remaster)
Space Oddity (2015 Remaster)
Ziggy Stardust (2012 Remaster)
… the list went on. I mean, sure, those versions would be okay, but they weren’t exactly what I wanted to hear. I’ve long found that the versions of songs bouncing around in my head are the versions I want to hear. If I have a tune in my head I want to listen to, it’s the one I remember, it’s never been a remastered version of it. So all of these tracks, as remasters, wouldn’t quite cut it.
But where were the original versions?
After looking over album after album on Apple Music, I discovered that there simply were none. Of all David Bowie songs I hunted for, the only ones available were the remastered versions. The end.
The Why of it is a whole thing unto itself, of course. For starters, why would Apple — a multi-trillion dollar tech company, for whom storing and offering up access to original albums as well as remastered versions would mean basically nothing in the cost of storage — not offer up more than just one version?
I couldn’t be mad about, it, of course. We’re paying for this one music streaming service and this is what the service was currently offering. We certainly have the freedom to pay a different music streaming company to access their music collection instead, if they offer more of what we’d like.
But it did occur to me again, as it has recently, that with all the streaming services we use as a society, we’ve kind of painted ourselves into a corner in terms of content availability: Many of us have given up parts of (or even entire) collections of movies, music, and books as streaming became more readily available and affordable, because so much — way more albums and movies than we ever had a copy of — were available online. And that’s still the case. It’s a very practical, usable system we’ve been buying into for many years now. Own less but have access to way more. But that comes to a quick stop when there’s something you want to see or hear or read that you discover isn’t available online. Then suddenly you find yourself wishing you hadn’t sold or given away that DVD or CD/vinyl or novel.
It seems, though, that the kids of Generation X parents (called either Generation Z or Generation Alpha, depending on what source you find) have thrown a curveball at this whole issue. While they’ve never known a world without the internet and streaming services, they seem to have a widening interest going old school and actually owning tangible things again.
My teen is of course into watching streamed videos entirely too much, but mixed in with that humdrum normalcy was genuinely delighted at seeing my mother’s VHS and Beta(!) video players and tapes unearthed in that storage room. And using our box of mishmash, throwback cables to connect the video players to a CRT TV we were previously talked into buying from a thrift store? The reaction was over the moon. The old cycle of what’s old being new again, and this newer generation wants it. They sometimes even want to know how it works and how they can modify it to work with modern tech, like how to get our streamed TV and movies onto a CRT television set that’s probably half my age.
The kid’s big ask for this past Christmas was a portable CD player and CD burner, like the kind I used twenty or thirty years ago. And while finding burnable CDs turned out to take a few more steps than expected, it occurred to me I couldn’t even tell you what software these days would be used for making custom music CDs. But evidently it’s available.
An unexpected twist to all this is that I’m finding the deep appreciation for old school technology a breath of fresh air, and it’s helped me look at our own modern habits more closely.
Instead of just paying to rent access to someone’s song collection, which is really all that music streaming is, what if we just bought a physical copy of it?
Imagine what a crazy world it would be where, instead of never owning any media — songs and movies and books, for instance — we just bought a copy of what we wanted to own and had it indefinitely?
What if… and stay with me on this wild tangent… we lived in a world where I could just have come home from that Bowie-lacking car ride and put on the version of a Bowie song that I wanted, from the original album sitting on my shelf, on the record player we owned?
Mind. Blown.
Listen, I love technology (though it hates me), but it’s become increasingly apparent that the trend has been that at least often, the more technology we get, the more it replaces what we previously had. And that’s not always a good thing.
The point being, there absolutely is — and there has always been — an upside to having collections of anything you enjoy in your spare time, and in owning what you pay for. It seems it’s taking younger minds to help us remember that.