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May 22, 2004 This is for all of us who have struggled with the countless paste ons, strip rips, adhesive wraps, silver straps and the what not gaggle of gadgets that separates us from opening our newest CD. This is for all the pissed off, frustrated consumers convinced that the supposedly simple art of unwrapping the latest musical malignancy is a covert government plot to enslave the masses and increase our political impotence. Pheeew, how’s that for a Wagnerian overture? We are all, sadly, too familiar with this characteristically 20th century scenario. To your own amazement and bedeviled bemusement you’ve survived another daily grind. You didn’t kill the s.o.b. who cut you off in traffic and, miraculously, he didn’t kill you. You didn’t hogtie, tar and feather the dorky kid at the record store who insisted you’d find the newest David Byrne disc under Burns. (This really happened to me even though I spelled B-y-r-n-e three times for him. I managed not to choke this experiment in Clearasil deprivation by recalling a similar incident earlier in my day, when the doe-eyed Spice Girl reject inquired wantonly of my breakfast order “Are sesame seeds the white ones or the black ones?” I immediately blamed it on the educational system like everyone else scapegoats and told her calmly, “No they’re the ecru ones,” and watched her brain explode.) So anyway, you’ve/we’ve/I’ve gotten the disc home and enjoyed dinner with that special someone. You pour yourself a glass of wine and totter over to the CD player. After a long hard day of goofs and nincompoops you’re deservedly ready to chill. But as your thumbnail starts to break the seal on the thin red strip rip a nascent, creeping anxiety pricks your arm hair and tightens your spine. You scream at the cat as you perilously peel away the cellophane. While twiddling with the pull tab that is supposed to tear away the top name label but only takes away half, you holler “Wait a damn minute!” at the missus who wants to hear the hit (women always want to hear the hits, don’t they?) Then, like searching for the end of the plastic wrap roll, you finger for the rest of the label and it comes off in teeny weeny, itsy bitsy bits, sticking to everything including the end of your nose. You should be in the clear by now but NO! there’s that God annoying silver thing that holds the jewel case shut. Jumpin’ Jesus! Whose high school drop out son-in-law is getting rich on this perpetually pending patented pain in the ass? What titan of industry devised this one and how much did the government pay him for reducing the pleasure of opening up a classic recording, like, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Coltrane’s A Love Supreme to the devious impropriety of breaking the seal on this month’s savory issue of Big Boobs ‘n Buns? With all this attested to and the silver strap clinging to your jeans you’re now ready to actually OPEN the disk! Unfortunately, with the way trends buzz by in pop music the sound you’ve been dying to hear is yesterday’s groove, and the disk is smudged from the silver strap glue residuals on your fingers and the cat’s gotten into the sticky bits and knocks over your wine. The lil’ darlin’ is still waiting for “that song on the radio that goes thumpa thumpa thump” and the phone rings or a fax comes in or the beeper beeps or your mother-in-law arrives or the power goes out or. . . Opening LPs was so much easier and gave credence to leisure time. So you had to get up and turn the record over (Boy, what a minor inconvience it seems like now, huh?) And maybe you tripped over the speaker wire or the loaded bong but dammit! you had more time to enjoy the things you wanted to do. Sure, vinyl skipped occasionally but has anyone listened to the radio lately? There seems to be glitches and and and and and and and sampling errors with almost every moth eaten Eight tracks, if my memory loss hasn’t expanded exponentially to critical mass, were packaged music listener friendly. You peeled the cellophane and slipped it out of the cardboard box. Obsolescence was never so easy. We should have gotten suspicious with cassettes though. The government got into package design with those little buggers I’m sure. You can almost see those Bela Lugosi types in subterranean labs cavorting with glee. “Let’s try this on the fools before we ship microchips to China in them! If they can open it anyone can!” We have only ourselves to blame. We should have been more astute and sensitive to the colossal social changes happening while we were intent on changing lanes for the next Thruway exit. Unless they start beaming the stuff directly into our brains (and wouldn’t the music biz love that, charging us for bandwidth and air space while the government taxes it all) we’ll continue to rip, tear, peel and shred our way through the filters and the filler just to hear the hit. ------------ Email Mike Jurkovic: rnrcurmudgeon@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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