Aztec Camera and the Graveyard of Music

I often envy the younger version of myself, who owned far less music but was more viscerally invested in it. After discovering rock music, for instance, I had a cheap little briefcase-like contraption that housed as many as 24 cassettes, and when it was still half-empty I knew each of those casette tapes awfully well, and I cared about them a lot. Then came the exciting time when I had more than 24 cassettes, and had to make the very interesting choice of which best 24 tapes would make the cut for the briefcase. And then, eventually, I had more casettes than I knew what to do with.

Too, when I bought my first CD player in 1990 it was a thing of considerable excitement to choose my first four or five CDs. Every new acquisition would be the focus of attention for at least a month or so. But as months go on, and then years, the shelves are eventually rotten with CDs, and now too the hard drives of my computers are clogged with unlistened-to music as well. At this point, I don't know whether I could realistically listen through my CD collection in a year without concerted effort, and that's not even addressing several dozen casette tapes that are still around and, believe it or not, more than a cubic foot of vinyl that has somehow persisted into the modern age.

Wouldn't less be more? Indeed, in my early 20s I had the chance to carry out the desert island experiment, taking just ten of my favorite cassettes to the island of Great Britain for a year. They served me well, and I don't remember feeling starved for music, just very attached to what I had. And thus I often think: if I divided my music collection into two equal piles, and tossed the lesser pile away, might it not make things better? Less cluttered? Might it even improve my relationship with music?

And sometimes I think, "well, I'll just start through the collection, listen to everything, and if it isn't great, it goes." And so I start at the beginning of the alphabet, and I listen to the 1990 Aztec Camera album, Stray. And here's the problem: I like that album. It's got good, catchy songs. Listening to it now reminds me of how it was one of my first CDs, a quirky birthday gift from a friend, and reminds me of the time in the early 1990s when I was listening to it regularly in a dingey apartment on Lynch Road in Lawrence, Kansas. These things make me not want to get rid of it. And this is a cycle that has been repeated four or five times.

Well, that's fine. There's no particular shame in holding on to an accomplished but somewhat obscure record from twenty years ago, even if it's a record that I only listen to and enjoy when I'm trying to decide whether I should throw it away. But to see the real magnitude of the problem, you have to multiply that record by, I don't know, hundreds. And at some point, these CDs, cassette tapes, vinyl albums, even computer files become more than mere clutter. They become depressing in the aggregate, a vast graveyard of music that I only wander through from time to time to pay my honest respects. Wouldn't less be more?