dual personalities

DN here with a Friday guest post. But don’t worry, I won’t be exhorting you to flip through a book…unless that book is full of compact discs! Hundreds of compact discs? Binders full of compact discs, and a car with a compact disc player to boot? Yes, please.

Unfortunately, a few of these discs do not play in our Subaru. Do you remember when a handful of record labels began copy-protecting CDs, so that a disc’s content could not be burned to a blank CD-R or even played on a computer at all? The band My Morning Jacket was so displeased that they sued Sony over it and offered to rip copies of their album themselves for fans. It’s a shame. That album has some great tracks.

This copy protection technology continues to haunt me, because it seems that our Subaru’s sound system works by reading or downloading the tracks rather than simply “playing” them. Is this different from the anti-skip technology found in portable CD players of yore? I have no idea. Was life better when the tunes were pumped through a cassette adapter attached to the Panasonic Extra Anti-Shock ((Shock Wave)) with XBS [extra bass]?

Well, no. This thing skipped constantly from the floor on the front passenger’s side. I guess I’ll just have to learn to live without the few albums that Subie won’t play. Even if this 2003 article from a law journal argues that copy protection violates my First Amendment rights.

Even without the copy-protected CDs, there is plenty to listen to. Ever on-trend, Katie’s recent favorite has been Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? How many four-year-olds do you know who wander around the house singing softly to themselves about how it’s never going to be the same / cause the years are falling by like the rain? Her wistfulness is haunting. What could my four-year-old feel nostalgic for?

Katie’s mood calls to mind our return trip from Michigan last month, when she burst into tears listening to a Pete the Cat song about how hard it is to be “the new kid.” Despite her tears, Katie wouldn’t let us stop playing the song. She wanted to hear the song! She wanted to feel sad. She told us this. She has a rich interior life.

Among the pleasures of replaying (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is the chance to introduce my incredible Oasis Voice™ to a new generation. Katie does not appreciate it—yet. En uh shahm-payn soup-er-know-ver en the skaw-eye.

Nailed it.

Another fun wrinkle is that Katie has begun to mashup Oasis and Pete the Cat. For example, in “One Cat’s Bucket,” a song about finding the good in every day, the chorus is:

One cat’s bucket is empty
He ain’t got nothing to show
Another cat flips it upside down
And makes himself a bongo

But now—and you’ll never be able to unhear it after reading the following words—the other cat flips it upside down, and cham-pagne sup-er-nov-er.

For the record, Ida loves my Oasis impression.

I am of the opinion that the disappearance of physical media also entails the loss of certain listening habits—habits that provided the conditions for an important attitude or value. Be patient with art. The hassle of unwrapping, uncasing, and inserting a CD meant that you were more likely to listen to an entire album. The difficulty of fast forwarding to a specific moment on a track meant that you didn’t even try. You just waited–and not even for that long! Just for a little bit. You waited, and while you were waiting, you listened. Now our Subaru has a digital slider that I can tap and drag to any moment in a song.

On the other hand, zoomers are apparently buying CDs again. Maybe there is hope after all. At least we know this for certain: Ida will never stop thinking that her dad is hilarious.