Before the advent of streaming music giving me any song and album or playlist I want on demand, there were CDs and tapes.
I put together a 31 minute video composed of a slideshow of photos of my CD collection (watch it here).
I uploaded a 14 minute video of my cassette tape collection separately here. I contemplated combining both, but I didn’t want the video to end up too long.
I photographed all the cassettes and CDs and labeled and edited the photos from April 12 to April 17, 2020, during my Covid-19 quarantine/ lockdown here in the Philippines.
(By that I mean all the photos of the cassettes and CDs in the YouTube links above and the photos I attached to this piece.)
These media- the tapes and the CDs were such a huge part of my formative years. Photographing them brought such a huge wave of nostalgia. Many of the albums represented a period of time in the life of anyone of my generation where there was so much possibility and potential, where everything so malleable, everything was in flux, and the sky was the limit.
I am not one of those middle aged curmudgeons firmly stuck in a nostalgic past who refuse to listen to any album released after they turned 25 and decry new music as just noisy garbage. Music is still a big part of my life, and I still seek out new music. I don’t find new music any worse than old music, and in fact, a few of the ’90s and early ’00s pop songs I used to love didn’t have lyrics that aged well, political correctness-wise.
Although granted they were also written when the artists were younger, when shock value was a big part of the appeal of the lyrics and presentation.
Anyway, back to new music, I still seek out new stuff, I also have my own favorites, and who knows, in 15–20 years, I may make a video with screenshots of my favorite songs and albums of my thirties from the Spotify era.
There’s something about these albums I present to you now though, not that they’re such musical groundbreakers or artistic masterpieces, that make them more sentimental and have a stronger emotional connection to me than the amazing new music I have discovered as a creaking old person in my thirties. And yes, a lot of it have to do with the specific moment in time when I discovered them and started listening to them, and also each album also bookmarked and bookended intense periods of growth as a young adult.
I was born in 1981, a very basic time, without all the Soundclouds and Spotifys and million little subgenres and musical fiefdoms youths have now, with their own little idols that don’t necessarily cross over with other youth groups.
Back then, one can argue that tastes were almost “flat” in a way, that while there were “alternative” and “indie” groups, as commercially available pop music available to us here in our little corner of Southeast Asia, in the Philippines, went, we only had these limited mostly chart toppers from commercial record labels.
And in a way, it’s easier for us Gen Xers to look back on and wax nostalgic about when listening to a modern, streaming playlist of songs from that era of high school and college, as we almost all universally listened to nearly the same groups and bands.
I also love all the liner art that came with the CDs and cassette tapes, some are reproductions of drawings, a few were handwritten lyrics, and there were many many great photographs that I didn’t appreciate back then, but looking back now as I photographed these photographs (how recursive haha), I realize these liner notes themselves are an art form distinct from the music itself. Not just “decoration” or “extras”.
So many albums had generous pages, glossy paper, I didn’t really look through all the photos until now, when I was choosing which pages to photograph. Those liner notes were some great art!
There was also an element of mild narcissistic egotism back then collecting music, as the access was not as “democratic” as now with all the Soundclouds and Spotifys and Deezers and what have you. You had to know of them, hunt them down in various stores, etc. Kind of like when kids collected baseball and basketball cards. To be “cool” was to actually own a physical copy of the album.
A lot of kids’ and young adults’ personalities back then, embarrassingly mine partially too, were tied up in the “cool” media they owned and chose to listen to (or watch, but I don’t think my wrist can handle another round of cataloguing my VHS collection).
It’s risible now at nearly 40, during a 4 day sprint photographing these climate change contributing plastic artifacts of the 1990s and 2000s in the middle of a pandemic, how much importance we all placed on these objects back then. How important it all seemed back then, when a lot of our lives revolved around commercially produced pop culture, haha.
Hope you enjoyed this glimpse inito my old school CD and cassette tape collection.
Summary of links:
My CD collection video.
My cassette tape collection video.
CD photo album on Flickr.
Tape photo album on Flickr.
My Instagram page of various collections.
YouTube Playlist of my other collections.
Click to enlarge:
