I just retrieved a box of my old CD's from my parents house. It was nice to listen to a couple of albums I'd forgotten about, but mainly what it made me think was, ew, CD's! What a crap piece of technology! How did they ever get to be so popular? Shouldn't the person who came up with that idea just have been sacked, immediately?
CD's have got to be the most charmless method of recording sound ever invented. Lacking the warmth, depth or even storability of vinyl, let alone the opportunity it provided for a nice psychedelic gatefold sleeve. No, just a nasty chunky plastic box which inevitably breaks, making it impossible to put it back together, and splattering your bedroom with small shards of non-biodegradable plastic which eventually embed themselves into your foot. Or maybe I should just hoover more often.
Equally, CD's lack the disposability, the ephemeralness of a download. In future decades, there will not be reams of 'Ibiza Athems 37' downloads filling up holes across the countryside. And thank god for that, I say. Any crap which you download in your mistaken youth can simply be deleted, for eternity, and won't reappear, 3 decades later, to reap shame upon your head.
But surely, I hear you cry, they were better than cassettes? At least they didn't get all snarled and jammed up in the machine, self-destructing in the process? To which I counter: true, but you can't rip out the innards of a CD and knit it, which you can with a cassette. And a casette, a pre-recorded one, was often about £5-£7. Ripping off your mate's copy was 99p a throw, and everybody had the technology.
Lest we forget, CD's were shockingly expensive. Some of the CD's I've found seem to have been as much as £15. And that was before we went all boom and bust inflationary! Back then, a loaf of bread was about 50p, and beans were 5p in the great baked bean war, people! (Ah, remember the baked bean war of the 90's? It was brilliant.)
There is something specifically crap about much technology from the 1990's. It had got past the interesting retro-future chunky-style thing that went on in the 80's, and was hitting mass production for the very first time. Computers were beige and I well remember how smug gits would sneer at you because they had a CD drive in their machines, while you were still labouring away with floppy disk drives. Yeah, they were great, those CD drives. They worked about half the time, and made horrid crunching noises, while the fan on your beige Windows 95 PC laboured like the whole thing was about to blow up, and you had to play 'Ibiza Chillout 37' to cover up the racket.
Mind you, I don't know why you'd expect any different, when you think it was the decade of Chris Evans, Oasis, and John Major. Culturally, it was like the dregs left on a restaurant plate after the main courses, the 60's, 70's and 80's, had been consumed. Sort of a 'smear of ketchup' kind of decade, rather than an item in its own right.
Anyway, does anyone want some CD's?
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