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 | | | | Apr30Written by:Philip Cody
Thursday, April 30, 1998 6:00 PM  I have an eight-track tape of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It's in a box, in my attic, nestled among other mementos of my analog life ... a trumpet mouthpiece, a wire recording of Gene Krupa's big band that my uncle made in the early Fifties, a small, leather pouch with three New York subway tokens from when tokens were a quarter, an empty pack of Lucky Strikes ... and a whole lot of other shit rendered useless and obsolete by the passing of time.
Nowhere, of course, in that box of archaic debris ... nowhere in my attic ... or in the state of Oregon ... nowhere in the entire U-S-of-fucking-A ... or the whole goddamned world, for that matter, does there exist an eight-track device into which I can insert this hunk of lifeless, black plastic and call forth the sweet, hard-on evoking sounds of my youth ... that filled my adolescent nights with the magic of ...
Sheh - reeeee
She - eh - eh - er - eee bay - yay - bee
She - ehr - reee
Won't you come out tonight
(Come, come ... come out to-nye-yight!)
No ... this particular alignment of metallic particles will never see a charge again. Silent now, it can never again fill the warm summer air with the horny love call of young men in tight pants. Useless now, it lies in a shroud of cobwebs, a mute remnant of a forgotten moment in time. An artifact now ... it remains as a missing piece to a puzzle, found, long after the rest of the puzzle has been lost.
In the course of our everyday lives, we have learned to take the hype and bullshit of digital technology in stride. Inundated with promotional information at every turn, most of us have come to believe the promise that "digital" will make everything better ... whether it has to do with music, education, finding our way around town, securing a job, purchasing a dildo or getting laid.
In a great many instances, "digital" certainly seems to be making things easier. If you're living way the hell out in East Bumfuck, Idaho, for example, and you get a craving for pickled frogs' legs in cream sauce ... you would have an easier time, with greater potential for success and get them on your plate faster by logging onto the Internet and doing a HotBot search for "frogs' legs" ... than you would driving fifty miles to the nearest Wal-Mart. Plus ... you wouldn't have to deal with an army of semi-literate, mutant jerk-offs, wearing smiley-face buttons. Personally, I enjoy the company of semi-literate, mutant jerk-offs ... though I wish they'd 86 the smiley-face shit ... and I welcome the opportunity to make the long drive to hang out with my Wal-Mart homeys.
If you believe that ... here's some more shit for your digital compost heap. Music recorded on analog tape sounds better than music recorded on any of the current digital media. There's a brightness and sparkle to well made analog recordings that seems to be absent in the digital domain. It's true that digital provides for a "cleaner" end result, but the price you pay for that cleanliness is often a dull, lifeless sounding track. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that you'd have to apply twice as much processing to a digital track ... to get it to sound as good as analog. Sure ... digital recording facilitates a great many editing opportunities that just aren't available to the analog recordist ... big fucking deal! Easier doesn't necessarily mean better. Easier only means that any semi-literate, mutant jerk-off can make a reasonable facsimile of a professional recording.
Meanwhile, back in the attic ...
Would you look at all this stuff! Boxes of old demos on two-track reels and not a two-track machine within a hundred miles. Stacks of old LPs ... a pile of silent vinyl without a turntable to give it life. Half a dozen Syquest 44 cartridges, filled with EPS samples and ... good golly, Miss Molly ... there's the old, noisy, temperamental Syquest drive right alongside. The EPS sampler, unfortunately, is somewhere in Bakersfield. I gave it to Spanky Beckwirth and he traded it for a TX81Z and a Micro-Verb. Spanky says he got the better end of the deal and I don't doubt that he's right.
The problem with the technological roller coaster we call "life at the end of the twentieth century" is ... once you get on it's almost impossible to get off ... and, when you get to the bottom of one hill, you have to change cars to get over the next ... and change again at the bottom of that one ... and so on and so on. I don't find this a particularly easy or enjoyable way to live. The rapid rate of descent and the continual stops and starts leave me feeling queasy to the point where I think I'm going to puke.
Then there's all those empty, riderless cars back down the line. What a fucking waste. Someone ought to hang out a sign that says "Welcome to the digital age ... where today's cool technology is tomorrow's pile of useless garbage!" Not that it would make a great deal of difference. Most of us are committed, via large expenditures of time and money, to staying on until the ride is over ... regardless of the toll it takes on our humanity and our environment.
As for myself ... I'm going to do a "Nancy Reagan" and just say NO. N - fucking - O!
I'm going to close my eyes and jump, in the hope that I come down, feet first, on solid, dependable, analog ground. Will I miss my techno toys? Like a recovering junkie misses his needle. But I'll be okay ... and I'll be here, every time your digital express leaves the station, running down the platform, waving your analog baggage in the air, shouting, "YOU FORGOT SOMETHING! YOU'RE GOING TO NEED CLEAN UNDERWEAR! DON'T LEAVE WITHOUT YOUR HAIR DRYER! WHAT ABOUT YOUR CONDOMS?!"
This is Mister Analog, bidding you peace, prosperity and ... bon voyage!
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Copyright - Philip Cody 1998
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