This is the introductory essay from this week’s issue of my weekly newsletter, Life Is So Beautiful. The entire newsletter, including links to five things I thought were beautiful, can be found here. – HH
I did something earlier this month I have not done in at least twelve years: I bought a CD.
I don’t mean I added an album to my streaming playlist. And I didn’t even buy the MP3 version. I mean, I bought a physical CD, which somebody (probably a robot) put in a padded envelope, and I waited three days, and it was in my mailbox.
It happened like this: I was doing some digital cleanup because my hard drive was at 75% capacity, and I’m a digital hoarder. It was a rainy day, and I had a horrible headache (rainy days always give me headaches) so I put on my rainy day jazz playlist and just started deleting things. Do I really need that screenshot from five years ago?
No, I do not.
Which is when I came across a folder on my computer called “Music”. I had honestly forgotten it was there. And in it were dozens of albums of music I own, and hundreds of individual songs. The Beatles. America. Thelonious Monk. Taize. Albert King. The Beastie Boys.
Some I can remember which record store I bought them from; remember standing in the store, listening to the samples over the headphones. Others I bought online as MP3s. Some go all the way back to the Limewire and Napster days.
Longtime readers may be shocked to discover I own this much music because I have stated often in these pages that I’m not really a music person. But that is only true if my basis of comparison is my wife, whose relationship to music is very different from my own. She feels music in a way that I do not, to the point she has preferred recordings of individual songs.
My own relationship to music is much more pedestrian: There is music I like, and music I don’t, but I don’t have music constantly playing in my car or office, I don’t go to live shows, and I’m tone deaf.
And in the old days, when I heard songs I liked, I would buy those CDs so I could listen whenever I wanted. But then streaming came along, and now I can listen to almost anything I want, whenever I want.
But I’m trying to live a life less dependent on companies owned by billionaires these days. After 25 years of being chronically online, I’m trying to distance myself from a life dependent on an internet connection. And I recognize streaming services pay the artists squat.
So when I found myself in a mood to listen to Dylan, rather than tell the device, “Alexa, play Bob Dylan”, I went online and bought a CD (his second album, which I did not own). And when it arrived, I ripped the songs to that folder on my hard drive, and then I put the CD on the shelf, so I have them, even if my computer should die a horrible death.
I know buying one CD changes nothing, not really. But it means I am ever so slightly more independent from companies that have very different agendas than mine. And these days, any independence is worth celebrating.