I like to pretend it's not 2016.
I wear too many layers in too hot of weather, flannels on top of T-shirts on top of waffle-weave shirts over leggings and skirts and Converse. I own 12 Nirvana shirts. And most importantly, my portable music is a Discman.
When you listen to a Discman, unless you burn a CD with several different artists and make yourself a playlist that way, you've got one album. One artist. You could carry around a bunch of CDs and switch them out frantically as you skip songs and try and get that one song at that one perfect time. But for the most part, you've got the CD you've got with you, and you listen to that one all the way through. And in a world of Pandora and Spotify and 'just hit shuffle,' listening to an album all the way through, with the songs in the order that they were put in, can become an almost religious experience.
It's an inconvenience to lug around a Discman. You've got to carry it unless you've got big enough pockets — I wear a jean jacket almost for the express purpose of my Discman. You can't switch around CDs as easily as you can scroll through an iPod (even if you make a playlist on a CD that requires some pre-meditated music-listening) — you probably don't have your entire library on you unless you've only got a couple of CDs. It skips if you walk too fast, or if you don't have it nestled just right in its little place. And all of those little inconveniences are beautiful.
I do have an iPod. It's old and cracked and the battery lasts about ten minutes on a good day, but I do have one. It's got about a thousand songs on it, and I stopped putting them on it about two years ago. The other day I brought it out and listened to a few songs and was actually shocked at how easily I fell back into the habit of listening to half a song, skipping three songs, scrolling through artists, listening to a third of a song here and then remembering, oh, wait that one.
And that sort of music-ADD is much harder with CDs. It's one thing that's usually brought up in "What Millennials are Doing Wrong Now" thinkpieces — a shorter attention span. With phones that can do just about anything but deliver a baby and so much at our fingertips so fast, a shorter attention span is expected. It's hard to just sit and do something, you have to sit and do something and also check twitter because there's a notification, there's a notification, a new e-mail, there's that, and skipping around on an iPod is something that becomes natural.
But with my CD habit, I feel different. Because now I can pop in an album and I can sit and listen to it all the way through, and it hits me a lot more dramatically than it would have if I would have just listened to one song, or if I would have listened to it out of order, or just half of this song and half of that song and the bridge of this song. The urgency is less with older technology, and the inconvenience makes you think. I honestly like the inconvenience, and I like the tactile nature of CDs. I like to shuffle through CDs in the morning and having to make a choice on what I'm going to listen to on the way to my first class. I like holding it carefully or wedging it between my keys and my phone in my pocket, and I like the little whir it makes when I hit pause. I like having to be conscious of all of these things, because when you stop being conscious of all of it then that's when you start being sucked into the present and being sucked into the present in 2016 is being sucked into the internet.. and don't get me wrong, I love the internet, but being sucked into the internet means being sucked into something that's not real.
And a CD is something much more real than an mp3.
