the next iTunes phase

I’m not sure how many of you use iTunes regularly, but I’ve become an addict. The first thing I did was download whole CD’s that I like but don’t happen to own.

But now I’ve entered a sort of “distant recovery” phase. I’ve mentioned before that I love new technologies but am almost never an early adopter. One of the things that meant is that I was strictly a cassette man until buying my first CD in 1994. I was one of those people who bet, and lost, that DAT’s were going to come wipe out CD players quickly, and we weren’t going to be fooled by the CD craze. In 1994 I happened to have a roommate with a nice CD player, and that made me face the fact that CD’s were probably the genre-to-stay.

But, pretty much all the music I listened to up to 1994 was on cassette. In many cases I replaced those cassettes with CD’s, just as the industry wished me to do (paying twice for the same music, over and over again in so many cases).

However, in many cases I simply never got around to buying the CD’s. And I left all my cassettes in a box in an Iowa storage locker a decade ago, never expecting to be in Egypt for this long. Which means that there is a large amount of music that I used to listen to intensively throughout the 1990’s that is no longer in my possession.

And for some reason, it’s all been flying back into my mind in recent days, and has become the object of intense craving in many cases. The ones whose titles I can remember are almost all on iTunes, and it’s a pretty affordable service when all is said and done, and certainly a fast one.

In other cases I can’t even remember the titles of the stuff. So I’ve been firing off emails to my youngest brother, who was sort of like my music “drug dealer” in the 1990’s, always giving me new bits of secret musical finds. Our tastes are an almost exact match, and he was better at finding new material than I was (he used to be a university radio d.j. and was able to find gold in the rubble on a regular basis when sifting through complimentary copies rapidly), so I’d just take whatever he gave me and it almost always hit the target perfectly.