Her dad, the 10k records he left behind and a viral lesson in grief
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Each to their own, it's certainly something I've done in the past as a (former) collector - the stress you felt may be more of a projection reaction, though your observations about meaning in the madness are valid.
And I do not think this is one of those things where if only she had spent six months studying it and doing a big wall full of pushpins, index cards, and post-its joined by yarn lines, suddenly it would all make sense and she’d inherit a magical musical truth.
I agree that your dad would have felt very satisfied that it was you who took care of those belongings.
When my paternal granddad died, he left 39 000 books behind. I hope you can imagine the physical and emotional effort of unloading 40k books.
Maybe the daughter should appreciate all that lovely ordering nuance, or maybe not. For my money, large collections are expressions of a pathology and there is no duty to keep them pristine once their owners pass. In fact I think it’s quite rude to leave that burden to others. Your shit, your problem.
On the other hand, if I am someone who hates to read, then yeah, even 40 books might be annoying much less 40K
No aggression meant towards the original commenter but in my experience as a son and grandson, that road can take you somewhere you don’t want to end up as a father.
Edit:I should add I’m just as pathological as the rest of my family. Instead of stuff I collect rules, and I have to be very careful to not impose those rules unconsciously on other people.
He rented a moving truck, and put them all in some storage units closer to where he lived. It turns out he had also recently lost his job, and so with nothing else to do, and the impending need for some money, he started cataloging and selling them on eBay, bootstrapped his way into opening a small comic book business, then opened a larger store selling other things, which turned into a small chain of stores selling all kinds of hobby and collector stuff in the local area.
When I decided to offload my small childhood collection, he made me a generous offer for it which enabled me to make rent month. As he was looking through what I brought he told me this story, I asked what happened to the original collection. He said he now had a warehouse full of inventory of people's collections like mine, and that he just continued to move them via his stores, shows, and eBay. It had made him a steady living.
What you do with these things very much depends on you and an ability to find positivity in the situation. A literal library's worth of books is not an easy thing to handle for certain. I grew up in a family printing business so I have a pretty reasonable idea of how difficult it is to handle and store 40-50-60k books so I'm not without sympathy. But there is often value in these kinds of things.
Huh? I alphabetize my collection so I can find things.
> Most of the vinyls were packed in boxes or held by relatives and friends before Jula slowly brought them all home
Seems like once she put the collection back together, the order was already lost.
Appart from that, I feel like there is some poetry to her slowly making it her own collection by listening to the records one by one. Kind of like a new like growing from within the records.
Most (but not all!) of that music is available online. But I listen to them now and then, in part for the linear experience that they offer, but also because they were his and meant a lot to him. And they were physical items - if he had left me his Spotify account, I'd get no value out of it.
Time to go put on some Grant Green..
You have a really awesome relationship with the physical media your dad left you. I imagine you play the vinyls on some kind of stereo and not in airpods or whatever? The medium asks you to use it to create an experience, an environment. Streaming doesn't care, so long as you're Consuming Content.
With the enshittification of Spotify (really? Ads for AI generated bullshit on my PAID account???) I really want to retreat back into the domain of Local Copy.
Sony BMG can't enshittify a CD you already own. Random House can't take back a book I bought in the 90s.
I hope that we have a renaissance of physical media as people realize that streaming companies don't respect our desires about how we listen/watch/read things.
I think you’re being a bit too charitable with the record industry IMHO. Buying records is “Consuming Content”, the experience is of your own creation.
I disagreed with everything he said (he claims music is bland now because of streaming and just sort of ignores that for all of history most art produced is terrible) except the attraction of physical media. When you had to go through a process to be able to listen to media and you were stuck with it once you bought it, it was a real experience. The art, the feel, the smell of the record shop, hell you had to talk to actual people if you wanted to find new music that you would like. Everything was part of the experience.
And that is lost with streaming music.
Organization on song within album within artist within genre helped me remember and relate to it. I felt like I was in conversation with the artists.
On the other hand, streaming is snippets without context, like a book composed of the most popular paragraphs from 1000s of authors.
I guess for me, being able engage with my personal library or playlists was irreplaceable.
I work with college kids. They don't understand the absolute obsession a lot of old people have with The Dark Side of the Moon. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why. It's like the perfect album.
And that's what finally dawned on me. It's the perfect album. The songs are really good individually, but the album is a masterpiece when played how it was originally meant to be played. The pauses and the transitions and the background noise of the player all brilliantly factor into the album.
And the 20 year olds I interact with mostly listen to individual songs instead of albums.
It's such a subtle difference that most people don't even recognize it.
The really good ones mostly play their own music, but aren't limited to their own output. Its a completely coherent experience with an intentional mood that completely flows together without any disjointed pauses. I don't think anyone actually misses skits or hidden songs, just that good albums sometimes had them.
But I've given up on ever convincing people that think perfect was in the past. Usually I'm told there isn't any difference between an iPod on random or a Spotify playlist. I personally never want to say the best music was at some arbitrary moment in the past when I liked it and hope my taste continue to evolve even as I get further away from the source.
My daughter is 18. She first listened to The Great Gig in The Sky on some joke/funny video involving Mario (I mean one of the Super Mario Bros). She looked what the song was, started listening to the album, and is now a huge Pink Floyd fan.
As for DSOTM, she has it on CD and Vinyl, though she mostly listens to their music on Deezer.
Learned to play the bass riff to Money too, so it seems some people still enjoy the full album listening experience and also digging deep (freak-territory deep) into the ones they really like.
I should add that neither my wife nor I (we both have mostly distinct taste in music, though with some overlap) forced anything on her or her brother (who is 10 and a big RHCP fan, in particular of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and professes to hate Pink Floyd, though I don’t know how much of that is just to annoy his sister), and while my wife is more of a song listener (and on streaming, a playlist listener, with she creating the lists) I’m an album listener myself. Even when I got to CDs (from tape, we couldn’t afford a turntable when I was young so I got to vinyl after I got my grandma’s collection) I rarely skipped a track unless I really felt it as filler.
The podcast No Dogs in Space brought this back for me. They discuss the stories of different artists, playing clips of their songs and explaining which got them their first gigs or record deals, when band members joined or left, other artists and music styles of the time, etc.
I've always been terrible with names, so I could never follow along with pop culture songs, albums, or artists. For the first time in my life I can overhear a song and identify it, the artist's influences, and related songs. I'm no longer a complete outsider in conversations about music.
Maybe once upon a time radio provided a lot of that--before it was taken over by standardized programming and advertisements.
Maybe if I maintained a excell sheet of artists or albums I like, I could brows that, and then play them, but meh.
I prefer to listen to full albums, but that I can do easily on Apple Music (Spotify is the same I think). And I can ask the player to play albums in a certain order. Is that what you're talking about? I don't see how "streeaming" made this impossible, it's just much easier actually.
Yes there are playlists and stations but there always were before streaming too.
Now there are releases that are digital only. It’s really odd. A huge part of the experience was the packaging and visual artwork and now that’s mostly gone.
The album was digital only, which I too was disappointed at. But if you chose to, they mailed something. When you got it, it was this black envelope with a very serious warning that if you opened it, it was going to cause a mess, and they had no liability whatsoever for said mess.
When you opened it, it was some album artwork prints, on cardstock... covered in fine black powder. Just, carbon black powder. With a hefty amount just in the envelope. Similar to laserjet printer toner.
If you handled the stuff, it got all over your hands. Everywhere. You got physically dirty from the album. It truly was a mess.
I thought it was awesome.
And then nearly every night, Trent would destroy one on stage by the end of the night.
Which is actually pretty hard to do if you know anything about Yamaha DX7's.
The relationship with the actual guy was significantly more complicated. CDs are a little easier to deal with than people.
Collecting stuff feels like a remnant of gen x, but in my family probably comes from my dad's greatest gen parents, and the idea of having even a modest amount of extra storage space for my own crap (like an extra coat) is becoming more and more distant, at least in my city where it seems the current cost of living space is $1k/sq ft (CAD). I'd choose the location over the stuff any day, but it seems a bit silly how dramatically cost escalates, as in a hundred thousand more just to have some space for full-size sofa and a bedroom in some cases. Won't even get any land for that price, just imaginary land in the sky; for a townhouse or something I'd need to increase my hypothetical budget by $500k, which are some expensive records!
Even in Canada I don't think rent is this high :) ... Curious what you meant, or was this just hyperbole?
It feels insane that in our next place, we'll likely be spending around $24k a year for a space with no bedroom, probably in someone's basement again, which is around what my dad currently earns after taxes, but it's a bit up to luck. I almost don't want to think about it, so much anxiety.
Sad state of things really, along with the economy. Unless you already make great money, inherented it, locked something in ages ago, or just prefer to live in the deep boonies, you're kind of screwed.
And this is having a real corrosive effect! When so much of the economy goes to rent, there's nothing left for buying consumer goods. Or starting businesses. People talk about not making things in the West due to high wages, but high property prices may be an even bigger effect.
I also don't think there's much of a concept of buying a starter condo that's significantly discounted but could be fixed up. Sure, you can redo the walls maybe and the finishes, but if the building had serious structural problems you're screwed, asbestos you're screwed, bad roof, no plumbing accomodation for in-suite laundry etc etc
Problem's bigger than Youtube.
https://framablog.org/2023/12/26/give-the-gift-of-free-softw...
It's hardly a platform issue. There are law firms that monitor public torrents and threaten anyone sharing from a naked IP address.
Every service with UGC is gonna have a frank of exchange of views with the RIAA or MPAA once they get big enough.
And you can make services without UGC too.
During lockdown there were things like https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/ , where the audience comments along but is all synchronously listening to their own copy. I'm still in a group which does this weekly with films.
Shameless plug: this is why I created digs.fm. I missed the days where you would just sit there with an album, and take it all in. And then you would go on to tell your friends about it.