Island Packet — Last week, very quietly, was a pretty big one for music nerds, a diagnosably obsessive-compulsive and spectacularly dorkwaddish bunch of which I count myself a member, as evidenced by the untold gigs of Springsteen bootlegs — live, studio, past, present, some CD-quality and some sounding like they were recorded from the inside of a garbage can several buildings down from the concert venue — sitting on my hard drive for reasons that have literally bored my friends to tears (listen, sometimes people just feel comfortable knowing they have 43 CDs’ worth of “River” outtakes, and I AM NOT GOING TO STAND FOR THIS INTERROGATION).
First, last Saturday saw the second annual Record Store Day, a national holiday created for the sole purpose of commerce, sort of like Valentine’s Day, or Guy Fawkes Day (seriously, that guy wasn’t even American). The idea of Record Store Day is to celebrate and defend what pre-Cambrian hominids referred to as “record stores,” ancient tabernacles of flammable corkboard shelving and asbestos that contain racks and racks of vinyl, cassingles and CDs, all media that was primarily popular in the 1650s.
Needless to say, much of that music was unlistenable, unless you were in the market for Donna Summer 12” dance remixes a lot, but that hardly prevented music dinguses like me from regarding them with the kind of starry-eyed nostalgia generally reserved for people’s stories about their grandparents, the birth of their firstborn or the first time they saw Springsteen (I KNOW, I’m working on it). Because there was always the chance, however many times you pored through the same racks before and before and before, that you missed some long-lost little jewel you never knew existed, thus justifying the time spent on your hunt, as well as your horrifying credit card bill.
You probably missed Record Store Day here in the Lowcountry because there are no record stores around in which celebrate such a day (a few in Columbia and Charleston did, but nothing closer). I don’t even remember the last time there was one, actually. There used to be a used-CD joint in Park Plaza, like 10 years ago, run by a very nice older couple who were one day literally stunned when I asked if they had a copy of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s “Mermaid Avenue.” Now there’s basically Best Buy, which is where I went in January to purchase the Deluxe Edition of Springsteen’s “Working on a Dream.” I went out and bought a CD, and it felt really, really weird.
There are a lot of reasons for that, and some of them may or may not have anything to do with The Pirate Bay, which is the other thing that happened last week. The Pirate Bay — I am told by, ahem, others whom I do not know and could not possibly name — is a massive clearinghouse of music thievery, one of the planet’s largest storehouses of downloadables of questionable legality. The Pirate Bay makes Napster look like that little raisin-baby Voldemort turned into at the end of “Deathly Hallows”; it is what Napster would be if it spent 10 years eating whatever Roger Clemens was on and that’s probably why its founders were found guilty of violating copyrights, fined a bunch of money and sentenced to jail in time, which will all be paid in 500 years when the appeals process ends.
The pro-Pirate Bay lobby online has already issued torrents of reasons why the conviction won’t matter, and of course they’re right. There are other piracy sites, there will be more piracy sites, and in a few years whatever new Whac-A-Mole sites have appeared will make The Pirate Bay look like someone’s adorable third-grade science-fair project, in the unlikely event they don’t exist already.
And for (another) industry in heaps of trouble, it spins around and around: The past gets feted for about 20 minutes, soon to be forgotten again, while the future is found to be spiraling out of control and needing to be curtailed. Like most music nerds, I imagine, I’ve become physically dependent on the ability to find most of what I need right in the iTunes search box, while everyone tries to figure out a workable business model and I bemoan the loss of the sense of discovery involved in walking into a low-ceilinged firetrap filled with irritating hipsters to find some long-forgotten treasure. So I gorge, and then I feel kind of fat, and I wish things were the way they were, sort of.
Stumble It!
Bonus points for “cassingle” — nicely done!
I miss those days as well!