I pick the soundtrack with immaculate care Such a lot rests upon it My life upon a song
I want to elaborate more on my love of physical media.
For much of my life, I was "behind" on so many things. Money (and lack thereof) was the most prominent reason as to why. I was the last of my friends to get a cell phone. I was the last of my friends to get an MP3 player. I was the last of my friends to get a DVD player, the last of my friends to get a CD, the last of my friends--or any of my peers, really--for most of things. We just did not have the financial means to keep up with Jones's, and had more pressing thing to allocate money to. I caught a lot of flack for continuing to listen to records, to tapes, to watch video tapes, to have a Walkman.
Now, of course, all these things are coming back as being fashionable, and if you had just continued to do so, you are branded as a dreaded "hipster" for bringing it up.
It's cool when they act as though they reinvented it, it's not cool to remind them that they have spent years giving you shit for it.
Of course, I love the digital access to things, and things that I never would have been on streaming platforms that now are (such as the Musical Highlights of the Mickey Mouse Club). I love discovering new music on Tidal or on YouTube. I love all of those things.
The new trend of the "analog 2026" is just more consumerism; I bought the tapes and the records with the little money that I had, or inherited them, and did so because I love them. I painstakingly sought these things out before The Age of the Internet. You couldn't just find things, you had to make an effort--go on a quest, even--to seek them out. I did not run out now and just buy them to post them on Instagram or TikTok, I spent decades collecting, curating, and loving everything that made up my tape and record collection. It was done piece by piece and done with intention. I loved these things, not because I thought they set me apart or made me look cool--because, trust me, when I was doing this it was NOT cool--I did it because I loved it and it made me feel safe in a world that rarely made me feel safe. I did not come from money, I did not have disposable income; a lot of the time, we didn't have money for food. I bought every single piece of physical media I did not inherit with care and intention and having to plan to do so.
I have talked about this before, but I think this idea is best exemplified by the day my (former) friends and I went out and bought a copy of My Chemical Romance's Black Parade. It was a seminal, communal experience with pooled expenses to buy the CD the day that the record came out, and how we all reverently sat in front of my stereo listening to it with the lyrics booklet in hand.
Even now when I am cleaning, I will put a tape on to clean instead of playlist. The music is warmer, rounder, and more human. Before digital, all different formats were mixed differently. The mixes for cassette tapes were always softer, rounder, warmer, and more human. I used to be the queen of the mixed tapes. There was a lot of freedom you could have in those 90 or so minutes of tape. You could even record yourself as an interjection, should you be so inclined. For as annoying as it could be, tapes from the radio were so magical.
You also own your physical media and people can't take it away from you; one of my biggest issues with streaming is that you own nothing, you buy access to it, and it's never yours. They can choose to revoke said access should they simply be so inclined. This has happened to me with several records, most notably JUMP! by Van Dyke Parks. I thankfully own it and it's on my iPod, but when my iPod battery could no longer withstand not constantly being plugged in, it was not on YouTube because it had been taken off most US-based streaming services. It's still not on Tidal. It's on Spotify, but you can't access it. It's on both Pandora and Deezer, but I am not even sure what Deezer is or anyone who uses it. One of my favourite films, God Help the Girl, was not on US streaming platforms for almost 2 years,so I bought the German Blu-ray (it's back now, thank God). If I pay for something, I want to own it, not just rent access to it. I also want to support artists because we make nothing from streaming platforms. I also-also, again, like the break from being plugged in all the time. Sometimes the bloody Comcast goes down and I want to watch a damn movie and not have interrupted by endless ads.
I think this video is very funny, and ultimately proves my point: so many things we have done for survival for decades become trends, and we smugly get accused of being hipsters. (You can tear reusing butter containers as Tupperware from my cold, dead hands, thank you very much--even if, yes, I have scores of very nice pieces of Tupperware now.)
I think what people are seeking out from "analog" return is a pause. For me, it's why I never really caught on for a full on digital experience. It's why I have a reluctance to An App For Everything (holy shit, am I with the Boomers on this one!!!), why I don't want a QR code menu, why I don't want to spend the entire God damn day at Disneyland on the bloody Disneyland App! Listening to records and tapes is intentional, and you have to at some point pause to turn the record or tape over. It was like a break within a break. With LiveJournal and Tumblr, you could walk away from the computer and not have to deal with the drama. You weren't constantly plugged into the chaos, you felt like you have more of an option to opt out of it. It's wild, if you think about it: people can be casually cruel from their phones, leaving shitty comments, sitting back and watching everything unfurl from there--but there was something even worse thinking about people sitting in front of their computers all day in a pre-smart phone era eagerly waiting to be shitty and sitting there and watching the comments or drama from a computer. IDK, as awful as the comments are now, there is just something... pathetic about people doing it from a computer.
May records never die.
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