Too Many CDs!
Original position in magazine: page 2
“TOO MANY CDS!” - Could this be the rallying cry for anyone even remotely connected with music these days? This note arrived from Martin Archer in a letter and appended to his own catalogue. Since starting this magazine I find my mailbox awash with sample CDs from the four corners of the globe. Record shops have mushroomed into a mega-business; back catalogues are reissued wholesale; artists release home-made CDs. I’m not ungrateful friends, please keep sending them! Yet does anyone else share my occasional ambivalence to this wealth of riches? Sometimes I love to wallow in the excess of my collections, enough music lining the walls of my cell to last me for ten lifetimes; so many unexplored regions, so many more still to discover. Then, every so often, the futility of everything hangs over me and I feel disgusted with this obscene pile of silver fripponeries; each CD seems an unnecessary distraction, a plaything for a jaded ninny reclining on his chaise longue. I abase myself in sackcloth and ashes, attempt to curb my spending habits, all without avail. The strange guilt I associate with overspending (probably instilled by my thrifty parents, truth be known) ruins my listening pleasure; music becomes as ashes in my mouth.
One phenomenon I used to enjoy was simply reading about records - not necessarily reviews, just news of their releases was sufficient to get my mouth watering. To begin with, reading is a guilt-free thing - you’re just window-shopping, looking at the expensive toys there but not spending your pocket money. Secondly, I always loved the idea of there being more going on than I could possibly handle, an exploding universe of endeavour which your handy music paper could attempt to navigate. Plus, of course, you could use reading as a substitute for listening - a well-informed opinion could be yours for the price of a bag of chips, and save you actually having to listen to the stuff. Of course, this is one of the late 20th century diseases - the ubiquitous print and electronic media filter everything through their refractive lenses, giving us all more or less the same distorted perspective on the artistic worlds. We’re over-informed, genned up on trivia about a movie which pre-condition our minds before we even enter the cinema.
What rescues one from the Too Many CDs factor? The actual process of listening, of course. Art creates a situation where, as Jeanette Winterson puts it, the smallness of life drops away. A good piece of music is a refreshing experience: the better it is, the more it will clear away the clutter of your brain and project its colours onto a clean sheet. Even an indifferent piece of music can do this to an extent. For the 70+ minutes that the laser tracks the bits, you’re in thrall to the experience. Whatever paranoid nonsense bothers you either side of this is your own business. The jewel cases become like so much empty paraphernalia, spent cartridge shells littering the battlefield; but it’s only through this apparatus that the art can enter your life in the first place.
There can never be too much music!
ED PINSENT