I went to a Fontaines D.C. concert tonight and while I stood there, third row, drowning in guitar feedback and full-bellied wails, mesmerized while watching Grian Chatten stalk around the stage like a man possessed, I thought about how I would never be experiencing this moment if I didn't spend £8 in that West London Rough Trade record store to buy their album.
If you walk into my childhood bedroom in Wood Dale, you'll see I have a few shelves containing no fewer than 300 CDs. Like every kid, I got a few here and there as different birthday or Christmas presents, but I really started seeking out new stuff to listen to myself the summer before I started high school. This began purely as a practical matter; songs on iTunes were $1.29 a pop, but you could buy a full used CD on eBay for $3.00. It was the best bang-for-your-buck if you didn't want to go the illegal download route, which I must also admit I was a culprit of.
Getting cheap used CDs on eBay slowly but surely progressed into going to some of the great Chicago-area record shops — Rolling Stones in Norridge and Reckless Records in The Loop and Wicker Park were my favorites — to peel through the racks and racks of music and uncover what piqued my interest that day, walking out an hour later with a full bag of new music to sit with. This continued all the way through college and became a much enjoyed holiday break tradition for me.
The ironic part is I started paying the monthly subscription for Apple Music in mid-2015. I had tens of millions of songs available at my fingertips, yet I still insisted on going to a record store whenever I got the chance and shelling out $60 every trip for a stack of CDs, some of which would inevitably be scratched and others of which I would never really get into, dooming them to a long retirement as a dust magnet on my shelf. So why did I do this?
Well, part of this was because sometimes I love music so much that I want to hold it. You can't express your love to an MP3 file, but you can take a CD, flip through the lyrics booklet, grip the case in your hand and examine every inch of the cover while listening to it...
But the bigger part was because I liked the idea of not having too many choices when listening to music. I liked the idea of spending money on a few CDs every now and then and saying, "Alright, these are the baskets I'm putting all my eggs in. I'm going to sit with them. I'm going to listen to them. And some of them I'll like, and some of them I won't, but it will never be because I didn't give them a fair shot." When you're using Spotify, it's way too easy to click "Skip" on any album that doesn't grab your attention by the horns in the first two tracks. But magically, when you spend $10 to buy the album on CD or vinyl, your ears are a bit more patient. And patience has good taste in music.
This was the case with Fontaines D.C. When I went to Rough Trade West in London to shop for records, I saw that Fontaines D.C.'s debut album "Dogrel" was named Rough Trade's Album of the Year. I hadn't heard much from the record before but decided to take a flyer on it off that award alone. When I finally got a chance to pop the CD into my car stereo and give it a listen a few weeks later, I was so utterly underwhelmed by it. I thought it was just uninteresting and monotonous. "Liberty Belle," the one track I had heard from it before, was so fun and bouncy and melodic. Everything else on the album just felt like a slosh.
But I had £8 invested in it, and I wasn't going to let those £8 go to waste. So I gave it a few more listens. I grappled with it over the following weeks. And somewhere around the fifth or sixth listen, the band took a hammer to the brick wall keeping them out of my psyche, and I was absolutely hooked. I couldn't get enough of the adrenaline rush that seemed to weave through the entire record. I was head-over-heels for the band and have only grown fonder in the two years and two additional albums since.
But if I had listened to "Dogrel" for the first time on streaming rather than CD, I would never have had this big change of heart. Streaming just doesn't ever seem to give you that same degree of space to let you come around to music. You either immediately like it and add it to your playlists, or you immediately don't like it and never hear from it again. I think buying CDs and consuming music the way I did throughout high school and college made me a much deeper music fan than I would have been if all of my listening time came from streaming, and it gave me the chance to fall in love with some stunning yet more inaccessible music that I may have otherwise quickly brushed aside on Apple Music.
CDs are a dated technology, but as I stood sweating through my t-shirt and flailing around at that Fontaines D.C. concert, I was more thankful for them than ever.
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