THE GREAT PURGING EVENT

June 7th, 2010 at 2:45pm
Vince Neilstein
facebook
twitter

490

The great purge of 2010 has begun — of my CD collection, that is. I’m preparing to move once again, and although I’ve still got three months to think about it, the experience of having to pack up my entire CD collection into boxes, carry them down a flight of stairs, load them into a truck, drive said truck across town, then carry everything up two and half more flights of stairs (in addition to all of my other furniture)… the experience still sticks with me from two years ago when I last moved. I have a lot of CDs. It was fucking brutal, and it made me re-think why the fuck I still hold onto this archaic form of music storage device.

I recognize that I mostly still hold onto my CD collection for sentimental reasons; I spent good money on them, and the memory of saving up dollar bills and going down to the record store on release day to get the new ______ album sticks with me. And while yes, to some degree I do still enjoy the artwork from time to time, to be honest I barely ever touch my CDs anymore. They just sit there on my shelves collecting dust except for the occasional “I’d love to hear THAT record I haven’t listened to in forever!” itch, at which point I pull down the CD and rip it to my hard drive, from whence it goes back to the shelf to resume its dust-collecting role forever. And when I move once again this Fall, I’ll be faced with the prospect of lugging these heavy motherfucking boxes around for reasons that basically amount to sentiment. I’ve got all my music backed up and double-backed up on hard drives, and there’s really no reason for me to keep these pieces of plastic and paper around anymore. But I still can’t part with them.

So I’ve made a compromise with myself. In preparation for this next move, I’m thinning out the collection by eliminating discs I never and will never listen to. When CDs were a novelty they were fun to horde — how many could you collect? — and you’d hold onto CDs you didn’t necessarily care about (maybe they were promos you got for free) just because they made your collection look that much more impressive. The compromise is that I’m getting rid of those CDs I don’t care about at all — and even some good ones that I can’t imagine ever craving holding a physical copy of — and keeping the ones that I really love, and of course the classics too. And I’m ripping all of the discarded CDs to my external hard drive(s), just in case.

In the process of doing this I’m also re-discovering albums I haven’t listened to in ages — like Event’s Scratching At the Surface. Does anyone remember this band? I got into them in the early 2000s; I was on a huuuuge King’s X kick, and I think it was AllMusic.com that recommend Event in that little “Sounds Like” section they have at the bottom of every artist page. So I sought out Scratching at the Surface on eBay and wasn’t disappointed. I have no idea what the band is up to these days, if anything, so hopefully they won’t mind that I’ve posted two of their songs above. Enjoy, and as always, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section on a) Event, and b) the CD predicament.