Somebody gimme a box!

The grand CD moveout has begun. Joel took away
Alternative (Pet Shop Boys), Little Earthquakes, a couple of early Kate Bush
albums. I’m digitizing the music I want to keep. Later on, I’m transferring what
I don’t listen to that often to DVD. This way I get more space, and less dust.
And other people get CDs free!

I’ve
rummaged in the utility room for a big box to haul away the CDs in and came up
with zilch, nothing, nada.

It’s just
depressing to realize how much music has left me. There are a couple in ex-ile
(practically irretrievable, as I don’t want to have anything to do with that ex
again), but so many more have been misplaced out of sheer carelessness. I’ve
lost 2 St. Germain albums (Boulevard and Tourist), Roni Size and
Reprazent, Karen Ramirez, Skunkhour… Thank heavens for
Limewire.

It’s been a treat, though, to
revisit my life’s soundscape. My first CD purchases were Doppelganger, by Curve (this one’s in Cavite
together with my early 90s CDs), and U2’s War (and I don’t know where that’s
at). I’ve always been a rock chick at heart – there must be a groupie gene
floating in my chromosome soup – but that hasn’t meant being deaf to funk and
bleep and the occasional AAD oboe.

The
Walkman and its descendants were responsible for music-as-insulation: your own
soul-saving bubble in the madding crowd. My first Walkman was a heavy black
monster (as all these gadgets were in their infancy) and it never left my bag. I
graduated to a smaller Walkman, and then to a Discman. It surprises me to think,
now, that my getting a car six years ago actually impoverished my
listening.