My friend Ross is moving to Japan and kindly offered to unload some of his compact discs on me before he tried selling them at Norm's over on Cooper Square. Yeah, like I need any more CDs. But never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I accepted Ross' kind offer and am going over to his place this evening to check'em out. In preparation, though, I thought it was more than high time to take a gander at my own collection to see which discs have outlived their usefulness. I've since managed to amass a stack of titles that I could very easily live without. Now comes the tricky part: finding a store that'll actually buy'em from me.
About a week ago, I strolled down to J&R Music World on Park Row, still searching that elusive copy of Official Bootleg Live by Venom. Unsurprisingly, they did not have it (although J&R does have a remarkable selection of stuff, especially in this day and age when compact disc outlets are vanishing left and right). In any case, while I was thumbing through the discs, I couldn't help but notice a couple standing just to my right. A burly hip-hop fan (bling aplenty, baseball hat askew just so, etc.) was busily rifling through the discs with a furrowed-brow, clearly fixated on finding something very specific. His gum-chewing, eye-rolling girlfriend dutifully stood by his side as he sternly searched and searched. I was very close to asking him what he was looking for until his girlfriend suddenly spoke up. "Why don't you just download it like everyone else in the world does?" He shot her a withering glance and she abruptly ceased further commentary. I couldn't stop myself from smiling. We may like different music and wear different clothes, but this man was my brother.
But as much as I project huge amounts of meaning and association onto virtually each and every compact disc I've managed to accumulate over the past couple of decades (and lets not even speak of my vinyl collection, still waiting in scattered flight cases in a couple of mini-storage facilities), one has to prune every now and then. While I continually draw the parallel of compact discs almost being like family photographs, there occasionally comes a time when they no longer warrant the space-expenditure (especially when you can rip them to your computer). So, while I'd never blithely throw out a vintage photograph of my uncle Bob, I can and will get rid of a healthy stack of music I just don't listen to, need or care about anymore.
Some of these discs have survived previous purges, but now their numbers are up. There is, however, a great chance that they'll still return to my shelves in the unfortunate event that Norm's or Academy or Sounds or whatever paltry used disc shop I drag them to simply isn't interested. As it stands now, the list is as follows. Speak up if you're interested in any of them, but maybe do it quickly!
Yes, I know there's a lot of Julian Cope in there, but with all due respect to the self-styled Arch Drude, the man simply hasn't made an album worth re-visiting since 1995's Twenty Mothers. Hell, I'm not even bothering to rip any tracks from those albums of his cited above. Sorry, Julian, but your quality control has dropped below the radar, and I'm not falling for it anymore.
Recent Comments