My Music Project

I have a ton of CDs. I love music, and listen to it all the time. I'm pretty much game for anything except for that shitty-ass country music that makes me want to kick a twangy-singing fool in the throat. And since my very first CD that I bought way back in the early 90s, I've grown to have quite a stable of CDs and all the plastic jewel cases they come in. And let's be honest, I have not purchased a CD in about 4-5 years because of this thing called the Internet and Bittorrent and stuff that makes "sharing" music with friends and family a helluva lot easier than paying $18 for a plastic coaster with 11 tracks on it.

But now I've taken the fight back to the CDs. After the holidays, each weekend I took a couple hours and burned CDs to my laptop. Just a few here and there while watching TV or just being the lazy slob I sometimes turn into on Sunday mornings. Well, about three weeks ago I finally finished. Couldn't believe it, but it was done. Everything from my massive Aerosmith collection to the highly suspect music options I gained when moving in with the wife. I'm not without my own questionable CD purchases from back in the day (a few too many 80s collections and others I won't mention ... but at least there's no Neil Diamond), but I'm blaming most of the suspect music on her. It's better that way, I think.

One of the best side effects to this whole project has been rediscovering music that I used to love and forgot all about. Like how funny 20 years later some of my Weird Al Yankovic songs still are. Or the memories from my childhood of my mom cleaning the house to Billy Joel's "Innocent Man" and MJ's "Thriller" and playing them until the songs were beaten into my head for all time. Or the albums that I used to think were good but were shamefully awful, awful, awful (I'm looking at you, Phish, Telsa and Pitchshifter). Then it's nice to rediscover music from college when we used to throw crazy-ass parties and listen to Prince, Run-DMC, Radiohead, KRS-ONE and stuff until the cops came.

Everything is now digital, and it's on a small portable hard drive that I have access to just about whenever. It's great for space saving, considering the drive fits in my pocket and still has room for plenty more albums to be added in. I've got another 200 GBs or so in leftover space and so I'll be adding more as things come in (like the new Animal Collective or The National or if Aerosmith continues to make albums until they're 118 years old). All-in-all, I have 260 artists and more than 400 CDs on that hard drive, and it's a very satisfying feeling seeing it all done. All the CDs are not gone from my house yet. They're now collecting dust on an unused shelf in the basement and the space we save upstairs looks nicer than 8 shelves of plastic shit just sitting there unused. Plus, someday when I feel confident about the state of things, I'll recycle all the CDs and feel better about that contribution to the green movement instead of just throwing them away. So everyone wins.