I realize that this series of Ludditicisms is going to make me seem about as truthful and direct as Bob Dole talking about drug use while sucking at the tit of the tobacco lobby (after all, I'm diddling my digits over the keyboard of a Power Mac, listening to a CD of The Police), but I'm pigheaded, and so I go on.

This time, I'd like to take a look at the flip side of technology and music production, the consumption of said product. How does technology affect how we listen to (and hear) music...and as a side effect, how does the technology revolution affect how we *buy* music?

OK, story time. When I was a kid, my sister got the first real record player my family ever had (lest you think that I'm as old as Dole as well as dishonest as he, I'm pushing forty...frighteningly hard). It was a small little pink and white box, single play little gizmo, with a bad needle and a bad attitude when it came to playing anything remotely warped.

In short, playing a record (we called them "LPs" and "45s" back then <hackwheeeeeeeze>) was nothing less than a ritual. It required all the things that rituals normally do: a headpriest(ess, in this case), acolytes, sacred objects, and an altar (kitchen tables would have been fine, but too much traffic: the record skipped), in order to get the latest Gene Pitney 45 to play with anything close to, um, high fidelity (HiFi, if you can remember that term...I guess it's called "sonic integrity" now).

So you can see that we *listened* to the music, and as a result, some pretty terrific music came out of the 60s and even the 50s, and early 70s (the technology started to catch up around then). OK, so Gene Pitney was no great shakes, sort of the 60s version of Jon Secada, but The Beatles, Stones, and so on made up for those types of artists, and Top 40 radio made sure that we got those bands early and often.

Stereo was an innovation that was certainly an improvement, although you could see where it headed when the first Deep Purple album came out (or was it Pink Floyd?), a song about rats...recorded rats that ran from speaker to speaker, certain to give your mother the willies quicker than pouring ketchup on your head and running in, screaming.

Stereo made it possible for us to (90s word time) emulate real sound. Yup....GI Joe with a Kung Fu grip for your ears.

And we lapped it up. Of course, when your choice was A) the old Philco cabinet radio, B) the black and white Magnavox, C) the scratchy Barbie Grammophone, or D) a Denon receiver (yes, that was a low end product back then) with stereo speakers and a light-up tuner dial...well....

But this still all sort of retained the original warm feeling of the music. You heard it as it was recorded, skips and all, feedback and all, flat notes and all. One of the revelations of my adulthood was to hear just how awful the production values on "Nights In White Satin" were. You didn't notice that on vinyl, and I'm not sure that I'm a better man for it.

As Jimi played Monterey, though, and as the Stones burned Altamont, there was smoke on the horizon that signaled the end of music as I grew up to know it. Was it headphones that came first? Was it cassettes?

No wait. It was worse.
EIGHT TRACK TAPES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

See, if you recall from the last piece I wrote about music, somewhere in the late 60s, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys had started to experiment with a four track recording system (yea, I know...Beatles used one as early as "Meet The Beatles", but they didn't abuse it and it was a novelty for them). Some anal-retentive engineer got the bright idea that, if you could record multiple tracks, you'd need to manufacture recordings that processed multi-track recordings into a single signal (easy folks, this was before digital processing), or at least dual channel signals, unless you were The Who, and could thumb your noses at your fans, and a wild piece of arrogance, defy them to purchase a four speaker quadrophonic system...and that's why The Who sucked.

Now four channels was an easy algorithim, even in the analog days: you could combine two into one, easy enough, engineers had done that for decades already, laying in echoes and the Phil-Spector-inspired Wall of Sound. Two tapes, playing into a third tape, and synching was a matter of holding two stop watches (at its most basic).

No one had enough hands when they got to eight-track recording. Oops. I suppose it was asking too much to train an octopus. Rather, they scrapped the whole idea, and came up with the eight track tape.

Funny thing about eight tracks...the sound quality was pretty good....faithful reproductions of music...only thing is that no one figured out how to make 'em small, to squeeze the tape into something the size of a cigarette box, and more important, because of the lack of quality materials, the surface area had to be limited. If you couldn't smoosh the tape's width, you had to compact it's length. So what ended up happening was that you'd be listening to, say, Boston's "More Than A Feeling", and just as he "saw my Marianne walkin--", the tape had to jump to the next part of the loop, and paused for a moment.

Did you ever make a Moebius strip when you were a kid? You take a strip of paper, give it a half twist, and tape the ends together, creating a single sided ring. Go on and try it, I'll wait.

Got one made? Good. Take a pen and start to draw a line along the surface, any surface, and then continue all the way around, without lifting your pen from the plane of the strip. Soon, you'll find your pen has reached the starting point, and you didn't have to flip the paper. This was the principle for the eight track tape.

It also fired some very unusual topologic theories in my high school, of how a girl was not really wearing a bra, and I'd be only to happy to demonstrate this to her, but my face got slapped enough to realize that sometimes, reality bites and it was better to leave the unwashed and uneducated in their clothes.

Back to eight tracks. You can imagine that this "skipping" pissed an awful lot of people off: artists, record companies, and especially those of us dumb enough to buy the players and tapes.

OK, I bought a Betamax too. OK? Happy now?

Did you ever make a Moebius strip when you were a kid? You take a strip of paper, give it a half twist, and tape the ends together, creating a single sided ring. Go on and try it, I'll wait.

Got one made? Good. Take a pen and start to draw a line along the surface, any surface, and then continue all the way around, without lifting your pen from the plane of the strip. Soon, you'll find your pen has reached the starting point, and you didn't have to flip the paper. This was the principle for the eight track tape.

It also fired some very unusual topologic theories in my high school, of how a girl was not really wearing a bra, and I'd be only to happy to demonstrate this to her, but my face got slapped enough to realize that sometimes, reality bites and it was better to leave the unwashed and uneducated in their clothes.

Back to eight tracks. You can imagine that this "skipping" pissed an awful lot of people off: artists, record companies, and especially those of us dumb enough to buy the players and tapes.

OK, I bought a Betamax too. OK? Happy now?

The logical extension of this technology was, of course, the cassette, which we glommed onto like white on rice. It was portable, in that you could bring your favorite album to a friend's house and not worry about his dog chewing the album. You could trade them, but more important, you could record on them and bring your favorite music around with you!

Now, this changed things dramatically. It was no longer a ritual, a rite of passage, to carefully take a platter out of its sleeve, puff the dust off it, and place it gently onto the turntable, gently cradling the needle in the womb of a track. You took your cassette out, popped it into the family player, hit "Play" and you were listening to "The Streak" or "Kung Fu Fighting", or some such thought-provoking hit.

As you can imagine, this created quite the stir. I can remember my sister having friends over to "listen to albums" (which was girlcode for "let's talk about the boys". And they say C++ is easy to learn!). Records were the raison d'etre of an awful lot of friendships, and whole clubs had arisen to borrow and lend albums around. Cassettes, and their ability to record music, changed all that. I could borrow your album for an hour, tape it, return it to you, and was under no obligation to offer one in exchange, because I was only taping it.

(I'm not going to go into copyright at this point. Suffice it to say that, compared to the Net, cassettes copyright and royalty difficulties were kindergarten).

In my view, this demythologized music, made it less of an honor to learn how to play music, made it less important that music be good, as long as it was convenient. If I could listen to an album at my house, my friend's house, at a party...why was I going to pay particular attention to it?

If you are old enough to remember this, then try this experiment. Think of an old 60s song...something by Alvin and The Chipmunks, for example. Can you remember the lyrics at all? Now try the same thing with a really popular novelty song of the 70s. Or 80s.

It's a lot harder to remember the words and tunes to songs like "The Night Chicago Died", than to anything by the 1810 Fruitgum Company. I'm convinced it's because we forced ourselves to listen more carefully when music was something we had to make time for.

You can see where I'm going with this. The next obvious innovation is the Walkman. Now, we could listen to music as white noise, masking out the world around us. This lessened us for two reasons: one, the noise around us was pretty damned important and shame on us for ignoring it, and two, music lost even more value for us, such that Paula Abdul could actually make records. If music = white noise, was it such a huge leap for a record company to say "hell, they aren't listening to this stuff, anyway....who needs artists? In fact, why waste shelfspace with albums. People want small. They want compact."

And by now, the technology was available to give it to us on a silver platter, literally.

I use many of my CDs for coasters, sort of my nose-thumbing at AOL for all those godawful offers in the mail. I used to have a neighbor, worked for 60 Second Records, the record review magazine. He did the cover art, and sometimes lent a hand reviewing. He used to get,in the days of vinyl, maybe a dozen albums a week. He now gets that many each morning (nevermind that UPS doesn't deliver until the evening around here). We're talking an increase of marketed albums in the geometric range here.

And most of it...well, if I could clean the coffee stains off them, I'd attach them here as .WAV files.

CDs....we've all heard the knock. They are cold, mechanical reproductions of music, and I suppose for a remastered Bach concerto conducted by Bernstein in 1973, there's something to that, but let's face facts: GIGO. If musicians are making technocrap, then the best medium for that is technogarbage.

And even that knock is being used as a marketing hook, as a hardware company is coming out with a digital-to-analog processor (it's in Wired this month) that reforms the signal to catch all those warm highs and mellow lows of an Eddie Van Halen, synthesizer enhanced lick.

It's going to get worse, folks, as soon as someone figures out the Net's bandwidth problems: we'll be emailing bits back and forth to our friends. We won't even be lending them the album anymore.