CD's

Today's post is going to be brief. Normally, with posts like 3 Songs, I leave and come back to the article several times over the day, so as to have a reasonable perspective and so as to prevent frustration. Today, however, I have been busier than usual, so this post will be completely off the cuff, compiled at 11:30 P.M. This can only go well.

I recently read a fantastic post by a gentleman named Zach Weiner in his blog (Weiner is the man behind the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Read it. It is far more entertaining than anything you will ever find on this blog). In this post, Weiner offered a fair and measured comparison of the old and new worlds in which libraries find themselves, the value of a physical book compared to moving forward technologically. Sadly, I can't link to it as I am very lazy, and as I felt at the time it would merely be an interesting piece of information I would absorb and never refer to again, I took no notice of the when, which is very important when scouring the archives of any blog.

I bring this post up as I wish to discuss something which finds itself in a very similar position: The CD. Now, I have no intention of being as even-handed as Weiner was in his discussion, but I truly hope I won't at any point resort to the phrase "CD's are better just because". But no promises.

Now, the thing that made me truly realise that CD's were beginning to lose the vital importance society had instilled upon them was with the release of the "Fifty-Five Vault" by Ben Folds around the same time he released his spectacular retrospective. This Vault had many tracks I wished to obtain, with one very big issue: It was not being released in a physical form. It was download only. Of course I was aware artists released download only work, but for someone as reliable and well-known as Ben Folds? It just seemed strange, and still sort of does. Until earlier this year, I had (besides a really dodgy MP3 player which worked for about a month back in 2005) only ever really used a Discman to listen to music on the move, so I have an obvious bias.

The main reason I really feel CD's still have a role is because of their artistic "purity". We're really getting into music snob territory here, but I am one of the few extremely naive people who think that the way a CD is made, set out and how the individual tracks are listed all convey the message the artist was trying to convey. I am, of course, aware that the original idea of an artist is changed often throughout the recording process (through constraints of money, talent, time, contract or even the stark shortcomings of reality), but I still feel the way a CD is made conveys a lot of the message meant by the artist. The artist sets out the CD to be heard from beginning to end by a listener, disregarding any other music played before or after their album. This is where Discmen excel, as the second a CD goes on a digital device, a large amount of context is lost. If you don't have your music device set on shuffle, the album is played directly after the end of the previous and the next begins with no fanfare. I think this is not fair to the artist, as their albums are meant to at least have a little contemplation, something near impossible when a song is already playing moments after the album has ended. Regardless of genre, era, age or fame, I think this is a basic respect which the CD allows.

That's it, really. I'm tired and probably don't have anything else of real value to say (like how I imply I ever did?).

H. Rourke