In 1999, on the eve of PopMatters’ inception, I was an angst-ridden teenager, who had a tendency for ditching classes only to sit in the toilet reading back issues of Rolling Stone. By the end of the decade, my love for grunge music had sent me searching through expanses that spanned Punk & New Wave to classic rock, gospel, and soul.

But despite my obsession with the retrospective milieu, I was always conscious that I was, of all things, a product of the ‘90s. As such, the world mythologized in the pages of music magazines about vinyl records, played on analogue players was something that I believed, belonged to my forefathers. Certainly, the rickety sound of a spindle scratching the surface of an old record was romantic, and the large artwork was appealing—but nevertheless, I was a staunch believer in the compact disc (CD). With its plastic shell, artwork, and liner notes, the CD had all the positive bearings of an old gramophone disc, except they were portable. This isn’t too mention, the shimmering and ‘untouchable’, optical surface intrinsic to every CD—for a music aficionado like myself there was something quixotic about this; it felt like music was sacred. It was something worth protecting.

Keep on Reading…

Pop Matters, Special Feature: PopMatters@10, 2009

Tags: CD, Curating, Mp3, Music, Rolling Stone, Velvet Underground

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