On the day that I purchased my new car a few months back, I muttered a poignant farewell to Little Richard, and to Dion & the Belmonts, too. Goodbye, friends since youth. The new car does not have a cassette tape player, or even a combination CD and cassette player. It has a CD player only. Thus, while I’m at it, goodbye to Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan and all of their tapes I’ve collected through the years.
They’re all sitting silent on shelves in my home. This is part of the price of a new car. The music goes where the technology goes, and the technology keeps changing on us.
Those of a certain age all know the drill by now. We grew up buying records, until the technology introduced cassette tapes. These were great, because we could play them in our cars when the radio was driving us nuts. No commercials, no insipid patter, just our favorite tunes whenever we were in the mood.
But then the technology changed again. This time, from tapes to CDs. Better sound quality, we were told. And you could play them in the car — just like the tapes.
At least, until now.
My new car, like a lot of the new models, no longer carries a combination CD and tape player. CDs, strictly. Bye-bye to tape players, and bye-bye to the years of music collected on them.
Hello to technology, selling us out again.
It’s inevitable, isn’t it? Some years back, the writer Paul Goodman told the American Marketing Association Congress, “Just the other day I listened to a young fellow sing a very passionate song about how technology is killing us and all that. But before he started, he bent down and plugged his electric guitar into the wall socket.”
Goodman said this in 1969, when people still thought phonograph records were cool. But cool is constantly redefined by profit margins.
You change the technology and thus create new markets. That old tape player’s no good, because they’re not making tapes any more. Planned obsolescence, they used to call it.
So there’s a choice: Do we purchase the music all over again in CD format — meaning scores of albums, at maybe $15 or $20 a pop?
Or do we acknowledge that the old music is simply one more part of our past that is now vanished for good?
Well, there’s another option. Surely there’s a place where they’re still selling portable cassette players, which could be plugged into an outlet in a new car. Surely they haven’t completely blocked us old tape users from our music.
So I went to various electronics stores. I went to a Goucher Boulevard electronics store — but they said they no longer carry tape players. I went to a York Road electronics store — but they only had tape players built into boom boxes. And boom boxes are too bulky for the car.
So I went to The City electronics store on Route 40 just off the Beltway, where a sales person named Alvin explained —– or tried to explain — that, with modern electronics, there are other ways to transfer music into CD or MP3 (whatever that is) form.
This involves computers, and music Web sites, and “burning off” any songs I wish to hear. Alvin said all this in a very patient and affable way, describing the greatness of new technology. But his language was a blur. I am an old dog not given to new tricks.
“Don’t you just have a portable cassette player that I could plug into my car?” I asked.
And he found one — a small Sony Clear Voice recorder, the last one in the store, he said, in a battered case that Alvin seemed slightly embarrassed to sell to me. He said I could buy this, plus a Belkin mini-stereo audio cable, and plug it into my car.
He said this reluctantly, as though offering one final plea to pull me into the 21st century with its computers and “burning off” and modern technology.
I stuck with the old. And off I went to pay for it, at a row of modern, high-tech, computerized cash registers, the newest models.
All of which had simultaneously crashed, and would not come up again for the next 30 minutes, while lines of impatient customers grew and grew.
“First time this has happened?” I asked the cashier, when I finally reached her.
“Happens all the time,” she said.
Yeah, that modern technology. It’s beautiful.
