The things we enjoyed in our youth often embarrass us as adults. Like people who had the Flock of Seagulls haircut in the ’80s, we look back at our younger selves and wonder: What the hell was I thinking?
For me, this most frequently occurs when I look at my CD collection.
I’ve amassed a decent-sized music library over the years. And, while it’s nowhere near as big as some of the real music geeks’ collections out there, it’s bigger than that of a lot of my friends. My mother, especially, used to comment, “You’re buying another CD? Don’t you have enough music already?”
And while I am quite fond of most of the music I’ve purchased over the years, there are a few discs that I can’t bear to listen to anymore.
When I was in high school, I was a big fan of “nü-metal” bands like KoЯn and Limp Bizkit.
I’m not sure why I liked these bands so much. I guess, as a teenage male, the anger in the music appealed to me. Despite having a pretty good life, I liked to think of myself as a tortured youth.
Not long ago, I was digging through my CDs and came upon one of my KoЯn discs. I thought to myself, “I haven’t listened to this is a looong time,” and popped it into the CD player.
I shut it off even before the first song had finished playing.
And, yet, I can’t bring myself to get rid of these albums. I haven’t listened to them in years. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever listen to them again, so why I don’t I just take them to the used record store?
I mean, OK, I probably wouldn’t get much for anything in the “nü-metal” genre—the record store isn’t going to pay much for something that’s likely to just take up space on the shelves—but why not get rid of them? I could take them to Value Village and be done with it.
I think the reason that I can’t get rid of them is because music helps define so much about my life that, by getting rid of the CDs, I would feel like I was erasing an important stage in my growth as a person. And so these embarassing CDs remain in my collection.
Do you have any embarrassing artifacts from your youth that you just can’t seem to let go? Let me know in the comments.
Christ, do I know this feeling. I’ve got a big music collection – 1300+ discs. Definitely some embarrassing shit in there, as the 90′s was a time when I bought music like it was going out of style. Funny, I did the same thing with a Korn CD not long ago – Follow the Leader. Sounded great then, shitty now. Sadly, NIN falls in the same category. I loved the Downward Spiral, played the shit out of it. Now, I can’t get past track 1. Ditto for the Deftones, KMFDM, Nitzer Ebb, Ministry, and many others. Stuff from the 80′s holds up better somehow. The 60′s and 70′s remain my favorite decades for music.
I think “Follow the Leader” was the same one that I tossed in there, remembering how awesome I used to think it was.
Funny you should mention the Deftones. I was just thinking, yesterday, that I haven’t listened to “White Pony” in a long time. I seem to remember it holding up to the test of time fairly well. Maybe I’ll give it a spin tonight and see how I feel about it today.
Hehe. I recently gave a listen to to old tracks that I was in love with growing up – these were my older sisters tunes I played on a “record player” or 8 track cassette player – and lo and behold, I fell in love with them again. This includes tunes by The Monkees, Stampeders, Neil Diamond before he started singing about flowers and Bette Midler and Carly Simon. I’ve put together some old nostalgia Playlists in my iTunes -and even converted some others to be “Believers.”
Who knows, maybe you’ll like your CDs again one day. Wait a decade or 2. Or until Tarantino puts them on a soundtrack.
The 60s and 70s? luv em.