The Music Our Parents Fell in Love to

“It's fascinating and stupid to watch adults destroy things on purpose.” --Chuck Klosterman

The following is a copy of a status update I posted on Facebook a couple months ago:

“(Nick Olig) declared 'Damn, it feels good to be a gangster' as he destroyed his tape deck 'Office Space ' style but now the CD player his friend generously installed in his Honda Accord isn't working and he realizes that God is punishing him for declaring himself a gangster (which he's obviously not) by forcing him to listen to the likes of REO Speedwagon and Styx.”

That's the truth. Only, instead of using a baseball bat to smash an antiquated and faltering piece of machinery like Michael Bolton did, I was swinging a sledgehammer. The CD player that my friend Max had installed functioned exceptionally, without a hitch, for about 10 minutes, until the machine refused to eject the CD, a copy of the Raconteurs' “Consolers of the Lonely.” I enjoy a good 70% of this album, but still, the thought of listening to it on an interminable loop was unbearable. And so later on I pried this disc out of the CD player with the aid of tweezers. The advice that my friend Matt gave me afterwards—as a perturbed vessel of common sense—was this: Electronics and tweezers don't mix. This axiom should be obvious to anyone who isn't a dipshit, and I knew it beforehand, but I had developed such a neurotic grudge against the electronics in question that I had become like a darkly obsessed protagonist from an Edgar Allan Poe story. The unrelenting drum beat from “Consolers of the Lonely” was the heart that pulsated loudly beneath the floorboards of my mind.

Removing the CD was a resolute and precise procedure that mirrored several failed attempts playing the board game Operation. The CD was not easy to extract. The alignment inside the CD player must have been jarred askew by the repeated yanks I exerted on the disc. And so after “Consolers of the Lonely” was tugged free, no more CDs would fit into the narrow slit of the Alpine. The dreadful ordeal was like offering a spoonful of mushed carrots to a fussy infant—or worse, actually: it was like offering that same spoonful to a fussy infant with its jaw wired shut.

And so my efforts to modernize and upgrade technologically backfired. Regression was the ultimate result when I felt like a destructive gangster because I had watched a great satirical comedy over a dozen times in college and therefore felt inspired to bash in my tape deck with a sledgehammer. Indeed, it was a fascinating and stupid gesture. I felt a begrudged and ambivalent fondness for the tape deck (even though it would only function two-thirds of the time) and yet I destroyed it because it caused me a black eye as an owner of dowdy and outdated things. Even so, I think I was justified in the undertone of contempt I felt for my tape deck. If your aim is to avoid the radio at all cost because you're finicky about music (like me), the tape deck ranks two slots below the CD player and the Ipod. I own a CD player, but not an I-pod, and the CD player is not fit for trips in a car. It seemed like an easy decision, to extend that hand one rung higher on the latter of technological advancement.

But the whole thing backfired, as I've told you, and now I've moved one slot below the tape deck to the radio. Not only on a scale of technological advancement, but also on a scale of complacency with music—the latter of which is far more important—the radio is inferior to the tape deck. I am now 275% more likely to crash my car into a jungle gym or a hot dog stand because I'm constantly fussing with the radio dial in a state of perpetual discontent. With only the radio to listen to on journeys across town to the library or Taco Bell, my last words are increasingly likely to be, “Def Leppard AGAIN?! Are you fucking kidding me?”


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