Notes from a tech dinosaur

When the mood of things becomes borderline irritating in Factorytown, what manages to finally tick me off is not being able to find an MP3 I wanted to listen to. Call me a techno idiot, but I gave in to digital media quite late so it’s only recently that I had to deal with gigabytes of music in my hard drives with no sense of organization whatsoever. Not finding a file makes me the office monster, so as an intervention, Penny, a co-worker, has been forcing me to create one playlist with songs I’m likely to listen to when I get pissed off.

The difficulty for someone my age is the association I make with the word “order”: it has to do with things physical. A lot of movies make fun of this stereotype: that obsessive-compulsive middle-aged person trying to get back to his or her senses by organizing something things on a table, furniture, clothes in a closet. Younger generations may choose to sit down and organize bits of data on virtual folders, but for me and my ilk we need to have a tangible sense of moving and movement.

Penny the co-worker listed all the music files I have. I can either pick a pool of songs and make one long playlist or be more specific with smaller customized lists. I’m told this is common now, with storage powerful enough to keep in your pocket and your ears plugged practically all hours of the day.

Many people pre-program lists like they were arranging a movie soundtrack, with music to last real time. They have ambiance for driving, for cooking, for exercising, for the bus, for whatever orchestra for the mundane, in five- to seven-minute ballads. Digital is the technological diamond for the musical control freak.

For traditional hoarders like myself, it’s really much simpler. You find the albums, and keep them. I belong to the disk and tape generation, and everything I own is stacked in cabinets and tabletops in my bedroom, which is small enough so that all of it is literally within arm’s reach. It may indeed be less bulky and a thousand times less dusty to go all digital, but there is a romance behind all this music stored in hard crystal cases. In that heap of things there is always a personal, intimate sense of order. (I have to admit that there were times I thought record collectors were bananas.)

While I try every now and then to organize my music according to genre or artist, they sort of arrange themselves eventually, according to the tenor of days.

Last night, just for fun, I took out a small stack from the bottom of a pile of disks. Being there, they must be albums I haven’t listened to for a while. I see several classical music collections, and a Japanese-edition compilation of Roy Orbison’s singles. I pop the latter in my player.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the disk itself is older than a high school kid, since these early CD releases seem to be somewhat thicker; though, it’s likely just the printed side giving it more weight (they did a lot of layered design then, using thinly embossed layers, instead of the clean poster-like printing used today).

I skip to the track Crying, the one song I actually know from this album. It was a live recording, and the audio still resonates crystal clear, without sounding re-mastered like most best-of collections do today. I snicker hearing the performance’s climax again, where Roy Orbison wails “crying” in a vibrato not very different from a sheep. I didn’t even know I still had this record.

This album found me in Quiapo, earlier in the decade. I was visiting those beerhouses along Quezon Blvd. that had stands selling second-hand disks from other countries. It was Led Zeppelin’s “BBC Sessions” that I was looking for (I previously saw one copy when I didn’t have money), but the sales girls usually look so sleepy during the day (they’re bar waitresses after all), so I did end up buying something every time I asked to look at some titles. After all, most merchandise there was cheaper than a burger.

Remembering my loot from that time, I think I managed to assemble a substantial collection from those beerhouses alone. I never found LedZep’s “BBC Sessions” (a friend found it instead and I paid him a full day’s salary for it), but I did get suitable replacements for many of my albums on tape, as well as artists I didn’t know (such as Nina Simone) or artists I somewhat recognized but didn’t know I knew (such as Hall and Oates). When you grew up in the ’80s, you’re bound to subconsciously know all the songs of pop acts, up to the subtlest bizarrely intelligible lyrics. Try playing Kiss on My List.

I wanted to play the Led Zeppelin BBC sessions, but that’s kept in a plastic trunk below my bed. It was among the harder-to-find albums I prioritized when I started ripping everything to digital. All of these disks on a single hard drive, yet I still prefer going through the dusty cases, if only to, for no better reason, establish a sense of context.

On top of the big heap on my desk, there’s a whole lot of albums by jazz and rock divas some would probably call the songs here standards. I must have been into girl-power, cold-war style, as I’ve been playing these disks recently. With the exception of the great dame Shirley Bassey, the artists in this group consist of dead women-of-color: Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Big Mama Thorton and Eartha Kitt. There’s also the new Janis Joplin anthology lost in the bunch for some variety.

Underneath the divas, the boxes are more organized. I must have not touched them since I last tried to put things in order. It’s probably because my cassette player nearly broke when it tipped over a month ago, and I took out a bunch of cassette tapes to see if it was still working. For a week or so, I was revisiting the tail end of Seattle grunge’s popularity.

The experience of listening to Soundgarden and Alice and Chains now seems like time travel, with their blaring grand rock melodies freshly overwhelming again, and the lyrics sounding as aggressive in both content and poetics the second time around. In the Philippines, when these bands were big, there was a silly “hip-hop vs. metal” carnival going on, and a good music follower was subliminally forced to belong to either one. It was my first time to experience having to pick a subculture, which was probably good preparation for the eventual boom of Pinoy rock, post-Eraserheads. That time around, I was participant in the evolution of the cultural phenomenon.

In restrospect, when technology was limited to gadgets that needed to be plugged in, listening to music was not as passive as it is today. If you want to listen to something, you put it in a machine. At the very least, that sort of demands a higher level of attention. The songs are not pre-programmed ambient music, as is the case for most people using iPods, shuffling bytes of music at the click of a finger.

I guess I must tell Penny the co-worker that I will never really make a playlist just to avoid being an office monster. There’s a time and place for everyone to flip, and that may even be healthy. In any case, there’s really no one musical genre to remedy the absurdity of the everyday grind, whether by agitating it more or sugarcoating it.

Looking for files, getting pissed off at not seeing what you’re looking for, and ending up playing some other song to soundtrack bad days at work: these are all part of the experience. Most of the time, I find ballads anyway, from the rock operatic to the cheesy The Kinks to Boyzone. You just have to love these songs. In their world, everything has got to do with love: too much of it, the lack of it, obsession with it.

What I’ll suggest we do instead is create playlists for other people, much like what we used to do when we were younger, and you compiled songs on a tape to give away   the “mix tape,” digital version, for friends and family. One could call it a reintroduction to my soundscape, intended to be a playlist for their days of discontent. I think that’s the more appropriate, and fun, playlist project. After all, I’m a tech dinosaur who does not even own a proper media player.

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E-mail the author: jaclynjoseforever@yahoo.com.