A recent Pitchfork feature on getting rid of your music collection recently moved me.
Have you ever wanted to delete or dump or sell all the music you own and start again? I decided to do this once. It wasn’t that I suddenly hated the music I liked. It wasn’t even thinking about each individual cassette or CD that made my heart itchy. I realized one evening how the blend of colors on their neatly ordered spines had become as familiar as wallpaper. I wanted to hear something new. I wanted to have heard nothing.
(I posted it to my del.icio.us account, but I know some of you don’t follow that.)
So I recommend it! Do it now, actually. Close this window, put all your music onto an external hard drive, give it to someone you trust and tell them to use it as a paperweight until next September, or at any rate until you use your safe word. Or be braver than I was, and tell them it’s an early birthday present. Of course now you can just go and download everything again but let’s assume you don’t.
Long-time readers here know that I have struggled with iTunes in Windows, iTunes on my Mac, three iPods, and a 90GB music library for a while. For a minute, it seemed like the new 160GB iPod was the answer - I would have room to grow, even if I couldn’t manage the whole thing from my MacBook, I’d finally be portable.
But the clutter of such a large library has something in common with the clutter on my bookshelves, in my office, in my career, and on my todo list. Coming across this article was a breakthrough for me - what’s all that old music doing there, anyway?
There are a thousand reasons to do this. For me, my old music was being held up to a standard of music from 15 years ago. I’d long mocked people who did this - in the revolution of mid-90s hard rock and alternative, who could complain that music wasn’t like it used to be? It was now awesome.
But did you know XM has a station dedicated to mid-90s alternative? That should have been my first sign, really. Music shouldn’t be (solely) about nostalgia. That’s not fair to anyone. When new music coming into your library has to duke it out with 90GB of established three- and four-star tracks, you can feel stuck on infinite repeat.
So I cut over to the Mac, bringing over only the following newish but not-wallpaper-to-me-yet albums:
- Kanye West - Graduation
- Tomahawk - Anonymous
- Rogue Wave - Asleep at Heaven’s Gate
- The New Pornographers - Challengers
- Prince - Planet Earth
- Interpol - Our Love to Admire
Beyond that, I’m trying to check out new stuff in new ways. This is getting sort of longish, so I’ll update you later on how it’s going, but I’m having a great time with the new surroundings so far. Let’s plan on a post about podcasts, one about mp3 blogs, one about what new music I’m enjoying so far, and one about my new music workflow.
