Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The Beatles’ Red Album. A flimsy single, Boom! Shake the Room, by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and a chunky double-decker compilation record, Now That’s What I Call Music! 24. I thought about these treasured objects – my first CDs, bought or gifted to me in the mid-1990s – when I read the other day that CD sales were enjoying an unexpected bounce in the mid-2020s. I felt pleased at the news of a resurgence, if distantly so, as you might on hearing something nice about an old friend you long ago lost touch with. So fans of Taylor Swift are gobbling up special-edition copies of her albums on CD? Overall sales of the format are higher than they’ve been in decades? Great! Good for good old CDs.
It made me think of being 10 years old, newly in possession of a plasticky portable stereo that had (I still remember the glamour of the phrase) a disc reader under its press-open lid. With CDs in a CD player, you could boom and shake your room on infinite repeat without stopping to rewind. You could digitally programme the Red Album to skip And I Love Her, that buzz kill, and reorder the soundtrack of Grease to prioritise Beauty School Dropout, as heaven surely intended. You could randomise the order of a Now compilation, putting yourself through a daring Russian roulette: Ugly Kid Joe (the sonic equivalent of an empty pistol chamber), then PM Dawn (another empty chamber), then Bryan Ferry (bullet through the head).
I was a child. I wouldn’t have known or cared about the bigger-picture changes happening in the music industry in terms of clarity of sound, manufacturing or distribution processes, what the shift towards a digitised, copyable archive of sound would mean in terms of piracy. Back in the 90s, I saw only the enormous new potential for control. I could take a carefully orchestrated album of 11 or 12 tracks and turn it from a multi-course meal, one dish progressing to the next, into a messy, free-for-all buffet. To this day, I can picture the horror on my friends’ faces when I played them a custom rearrangement of Oasis’s second album: She’s Electric, She’s Electric, She’s Electric, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, Roll With It, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Cast No Shadow, She’s Electric, Some Might Say, She’s Electric.
To my generation, born at the same time as the CD in the early 1980s, teenagers by the time this was a globally dominant product, we felt like we had our format, a rejection of the massive, licquorice-y vinyl owned by our parents, a clear advance on the cassette tapes cherished by older siblings and cousins. For some reason, I never saw CDs as precious, fragile or collectible objects, even though plenty of my friends did. As far as I could tell, there were four types of CD collection in the 1990s: the Pile, the Rack, the Cabinet and the Archive.
Mine was a Pile, a collection kept in no sort of order, with glossy inserts and booklets that were always scuffed and had their staples coming loose. Those who Piled like me knew all too well the dreaded butterfly effect when you failed to put a disc back in its rightful case. One day you’d decide to play Portishead by Portishead, removing from the stereo the double A-side of I Believe/Up on the Roof by Robson & Jerome that had been in there before. Who could say where the case for that double A-side had got to? Easiest to sling the disc in the open, inviting Portishead case.
After a few rounds of this you’d be opening The Score by the Fugees to find the soundtrack from a Levi’s ad. You’d want to dance to Setting Sun by the Chemical Brothers and have to settle instead for I Am, I Feel by Alisha’s Attic. As someone with a Pile, you were likely to start mislaying cover slips and lyric booklets pretty quickly. One advantage of this was that the front panes of the CD cases became little windows. Wrongly housed discs were slightly easier to find.
Compared with the Pile, the Rack was a halfway house towards respectability, a realistic attempt at order. Made of dark, matt-finished black plastic or a clearer acrylic, the CD racks and carousels of my youth allowed collectors to sweep a glance over a load of case spines at once, scanning for (say) the strip of white and bright orange that signified the Trainspotting soundtrack or the warmer, orangey-white that meant Blur by Blur. Related to the Rack was the Cabinet, usually towering and made of wood, with the tell-tale shelves that were just too small for paperback books. The Cabinet was ascended-to by collectors when the number of discs they owned became too much to be contained by factory-moulded plastic. When the novelist Colm Tóibín said recently that “home is where the CDs are”, he can only have been thinking of a Cabinet-sized collection, beloved, built up over time, a massive bloody pain to transport.
The last type of collection was the Archive, a shrine-like version of the Cabinet that was kept pristine, in A-to-Z order, perhaps with additional separation of albums and singles by genre, rarity, region of release. My best friend had the beginnings of an Archive, stuffed with immaculate copies of Suede, Beck, every CD the Britpop band Mansun had ever released. I remember the day he added an obscure import copy of Ash’s 1995 single Kung Fu. This CD had come all the way to England from Japan. When we held it we did so in awe, by the farthest corners of the case, like teenaged auctioneers.
Recently, I messaged him to ask what became of that treasured Ash disc. Oh (he said) he got rid of almost all of his singles years ago. They took up too much room. His import copy of Kung Fu was gone, maybe to someone else’s collection by now, maybe to someone’s bin.
“I feel weirdly sad to think of you without a copy of Mansun’s Taxloss to hand,” I wrote.
“I did keep my Mansun singles,” he wrote back.
“Thank God.”
The great shedding of CDs began, at least for me, around the turn of the millennium, when the world went online. I remember first seeing the music-sharing software Napster in action in early 2000. Using a dial-up connection, it took someone an hour to download Soul Bossa Nova (Original Mix) from the Austin Powers soundtrack. A year later, I visited a friend at a US college where the students had access to broadband. Using Napster, or one of the many equivalent pieces of file-sharing software that were proliferating at the time, tracks were downloadable in minutes. Whole albums by Gorillaz, Gabrielle, Ginuwine fell off the internet over the course of a day, like apples.
Around 2004 I started consolidating my albums and my singles on a desktop computer, ripping the CDs I already owned to my hard drive and sending the contents from there to an MP3 player. It was probably because I was a Piler, never a Racker or a Shelfer, let alone an Archivist, that I found it so easy to leave CDs behind. The first four albums by Belle and Sebastian had been in heavy rotation for me for years, always in and out of the stereo. Once I’d digitised these albums (in the 2000s, the work of minutes), I hardly touched them again. In 2005 I bought a lozenge-like iPod Shuffle that was about the size and weight of a packet of chewing gum and had room for 20-odd albums. At home, the computer replaced the stereo as a music player. I had dozens of albums, secure on a hard drive, playable with a double-click.
Where did you end up, my Belle and Sebastian CDs? My Blur by Blur? My Grease and my Nows? Some of these CDs were so overhandled by the time of their abandonment, the printed lettering on top of the discs had rubbed away, the grooved inside of cases had chipped or gone, and the plastic faceplates were grazed and foggy. Did I give the Belle and Sebastians away? Did they end up in landfill, with my friend’s abandoned Ash and Suede singles? I know the Belle and Sebastians didn’t make it as far as my last bin bag, a gathering-together of CDs belonging to me and to my wife that we gave away when we moved flats in 2012.
By this point we were both listening to music through a subscription streaming service – Spotify at first, then Apple’s equivalent. Even the invisible MP3s on my computer’s hard drive had started to feel fiddly and archaic, an unnecessary burden: so, of course, the last of the CDs had to go. I made the argument to my wife that we should do a clean sweep. I took all the discs we had to an Oxfam on Kentish Town Road. I remember handing the bag over dubiously, with no faith in the resale value of the contents. What a cool thing, I told myself, as I walked away unencumbered, to own no albums… yet somehow to own every album. What freedom! What choice!
I don’t know how long it took for the regret to sink in. Three years? Five? I know that I miss my pile of CDs now. I miss the fussy, fusty process of deciding to put one on, a rummaging hand, a scour for the correct disc, the colours and the fonts and feel of the plastic circles, lightweight yet at the same time heavy with associative feeling. I miss having signposted reminders of songs or records I loved during specific eras in my life. Streaming’s better, on the whole. I’ve paid out so much money in monthly subscriptions by now I have to believe it’s better. My access to new or unheard music has expanded. My diet is more varied. But something lovely has gone. Pointless denying that.
Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture is available to listen to on Apple Music, I see. So is a 2016 album of Grease tributes, including Boyz II Men singing Beauty School Dropout. My current subscription gives me access to about a dozen volumes of Now covering 2021 to 2024. The Beatles’ Red Album is on there, with an animated tweak to the cover that renders John, Paul, George and Ringo vanishing away into nothing. As I look at this graphic on my iPhone, propped on the desk beside me, it looks as if the band are repeatedly fading into the depths of the device, there to join the pixels, the compressed data, the algorithms, the nudging search results – innovations that enrich as well as complicate today’s curation and consumption of music.
If it meant swapping what we have today for what we had then, I wouldn’t go back. I’m too greedy for the new stuff and too impatient to be fed with music when I want to be fed. That cover of Beauty School Dropout by Boyz II Men is decent, it turns out, and I never would have listened to it were it not for this opening up of a digitised music landscape, where one discovery leads to another then another, seamlessly, more or less infinitely. Piercing through the convenience of this, though, comes the regret about my old CDs.
When my primary school-age children want to put on music in our home they have to find a phone, mine or their mother’s. They have to scroll or type on a screen, press play, then wait for the mysterious rearrangement of ones and zeros that will bring Taylor or Oasis or the first track of In the Heights out of a wireless speaker. It’s an impressive process. I still find myself wanting to whistle, amazed by how far music tech has come. But there’s an absence now, some loss of connection with the initial creators of these pieces of art, some loss of awareness, too, about the spots they occupy in time and space.
For my children, attentive listeners though they are, Taylor might as well be a direct contemporary of Liam and Noel. All three of them might have grown up together in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Manhattan, or Stormzy’s Croydon, or in a Kings Road boozer of the 1960s. Now that music is invisible, everywhere and nowhere, served up track by track in capsule form, there aren’t the same indicators about provenance, influence, chronology, originality.
We don’t have a CD player in our home any more. There is one, never used, in our car. Perhaps I’ll stop in a charity shop the next time I pass one: buy a few CDs. Perhaps I’ll go down to the Oxfam on Kentish Town Road and see if I can buy back one or two of my CDs. If any of them are still there, I reckon I’d know them at once. The half-torn HMV label on Expecting to Fly by the Bluetones. A curved moon of acrylic missing from the corner of my Trainspotting case. I’d recognise them all, right away – old mates.
Tom Lamont’s debut novel, Going Home, is out now. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Three musicians on their love of CDs
Bashy: ‘Vinyl is great but it’s very much a luxury’
British actor and rapper
There’s something about the tangible nature of CDs that really appeals to me. I released an album recently, and even though it was online and people were listening to it and talking about it, it only properly landed with me when I had the CD in my hand. That physical feeling gave me a sense of completion. There’s a video of me on my Instagram opening up the CD and taking in the artwork for the first time. It’s something I really care about.
I was born in 1985 and grew up at the intersection of vinyl, cassettes and CDs. The first album I bought on CD was Kiss the Game Goodbye by Jadakiss and I ended up collecting hundreds and hundreds, which I stacked up in my room like a work of art. You could see someone’s musical taste through their CDs – mine included 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill – whereas now it’s hidden away in your phone out of view.
Vinyl is great but it was expensive then and it’s very much a luxury now. For young kids from working-class backgrounds, the CD was a way for us to spread our music in a cost-effective manner. So it was essential in the London grime and hip-hop scenes before social media. In 2008 I put out The Chupa-Chups Mixtape, which I pressed up on CD myself, attaching a Chupa-Chups lollipop to the front of each cover with Sellotape. I put it in barber shops and local clothes shops for people to buy and the lollipop helped it stand out visually. Then it started to take on a life of its own. People would tell their friends about it, or they’d burn up a copy to share around. Thanks to that mixtape, I ended up making the theme song for the film Adulthood. It helped me lay my foundations as an artist.
Streaming has its advantages, but a lot of people are missing that physicality a CD gives you. The artwork and the liner notes and printed lyrics become an extension of the music. You can get a feeling of what the album is about, or who the artist is, before you’ve even pressed play. So I don’t think the CD format is dead or has ever died, it’s just been overlooked for a while because of the digital music revolution. I’m really glad to see it resurfacing. Interview by Killian Fox
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Bashy’s new album, Being Poor Is Expensive, is out now. The Chupa-Chups Mixtape can be streamed here. 1Xtra’s Album Launch Party with Bashy is on BBC iPlayer
Kitty Liv: ‘CDs give you an insight into the journey of an album’
Singer-songwriter, member of Kitty, Daisy & Lewis)
I was born in the early 90s and CDs were the biggest thing when I was growing up. I used to get them for Christmas presents, and sometimes I’d go to Woolworths and choose one. I’d burn them a lot and make my own compilations. It was such a straightforward thing to do as a kid on the family computer. It would be a huge mix of anything I was listening to at the time, from Elvis’s greatest hits to Daniel Bedingfield, T Rex and then random stuff by Eminem, a combination of whatever was popular at the time with music I really loved. I remember going to my local cafe, Mario’s in Kentish Town, and if I made him a CD, he’d give me a free breakfast. I was probably about 10.
Streaming platforms are good for discovering new music, but in terms of the listening experience, I think CDs are a great thing. Music has become quite disposable now, and with streaming, there is not that sense of urgency to listen to new music. If there’s a new song out, I might give it a listen later, whereas with CDs, it was like: “I’ll get the CD and I’ll put it on in the car and listen to the whole album.” Having the attention span to listen has been lost, certainly with the younger generation. I hope that will come back because when you make music, it’s great when someone else gets an insight into the journey that you’ve had making that record. Interview by Tess Reidy
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Kitty Liv’s debut solo album, Easy Tiger, is out now on Sunday Best Recordings, on digital, vinyl and – of course – CD
Joe Mount: ‘Hidden tracks are just not hidden any more’
Lead singer/ guitarist, Metronomy
We were a tape household and we weren’t in the first wave of people to buy a CD player, but eventually, one Christmas, my sister ended up getting a ghettoblaster with a disc player. I just remember then having to try to build a collection and feeling a bit begrudging that I already had loads of stuff on tape. The quickest route to getting a CD collection was buying magazines that had cover-mount CDs on them, and so a lot of my earliest ones were from Q magazine or Select. One, which I still have, was called Be There Now. It had Radiohead, Wire, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Talking Heads and Talk Talk. That was ’97.
In the Britpop days, there were always inventive ways of making you buy more music. I remember having a Pulp CD and it had three slots for discs, but you had to go and buy individual singles to build up this collection. I never really splurged a load of money on them and I soon veered more into vinyl.
A lot of the CDs I owned I still have and they’re at my parents’ house. There’s the Aaliyah record, the one with a picture of her and the red cover. I’ve also got the Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf and In Search of… by NERD.
I think music streaming is not too bad, but I do slightly lament the fact that hidden tracks are just not hidden any more. It was a glory age of actually concealing things on discs. The first time I remember hearing a hidden track was on the Lemonheads’ Come On Feel the Lemonheads, which has a hidden reprise at the very end. The other thing I miss about the format is the printed artwork. I think that’s a really nice thing and people got quite creative with the different types of CD cases that they made.
In terms of durability, however, CDs have never been good. When my wife and I left the first flat we shared together, she had an enormous CD collection, and I was trying to organise it all and every case I opened there was no CD in it. They were in a DJ folder, completely scratched. I very passive aggressively put all the empty CD cases in a box and she wouldn’t let me throw them away, so I had to label it “empty CD cases”. We’ve still got that!
These days, you can go into charity shops and find decent albums on CD for 50p. I like doing that ahead of car journeys and enjoying the fact that you don’t need to care about them too much. You know they’ve already had their first usage and it’s like an act of recycling, like having the last crack of the scratched CD. TR
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Metronomy’s Posse EP Volume 2 is out now on Ninja Tune
Source: theguardian.com
