7/10

My car window got busted a week or so ago and my friend and band mate’s 80 gig Ipod was ripped off. They didn’t seem interested in my Sabbath tape for some strange reason. Anyway, I’ve been having to drive my sister’s smoking hot ‘95 Toyota Corolla, complete with World Peace,Tau Beta Sigma, and ‘Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History’ stickers. Outside of being a sardine tin death trap, some form of black magic has damned this automotive gem’s brakes to generate a high pitched screeching sound every time you brake too hard. This long ago earned it the loving nickname Squeals. Despite all of this however we come to the totally tubular CD deck we had installed around 2003, I was spoiled by my Buick Century’s tape deck because I was able to force feed it the future with the employment of a space aged tape converter courtesy of Best Buy for ten bucks. But now I find myself back in my high school habit of burning sweet mix CDs and digging through dusty spindles of epic purchases from a Zia Records that no longer exists. I have to say it’s actually been quite pleasant. I know it’s pretty grody to even conceive of listening to CDs in these times of analog retro chic. But I think it’s awesome that I can splice together some totally wicked jams in a matter of minutes and be on my way. I’d like to see CD’s crawl back to the top of the eternal battle for format superiority. I’d like to see a mass of discman’s and oversized Natalie Portman headphones when I walk onto ASU campus next semester. Ipods are maddeningly hard to cope with simply due to the overwhelming amount of tuneage you can fit on there. I often spend half my commute recklessly driving while searching for that perfect record amidst the tidal waves of digital vomit I have on my ipod. CDs are so cheap these days that you can pre-game your entire days listening as frequent as you want and waste no time endangering the lives of others on the SR 51. I believe there’s a case to be made for CDs and await the coming days of ebaying limited pressing demo CDs, because it’s just as fucking arbitrary in the end isn’t it?  

-RC