August 2023 – c90lounge

I turned sixty-six last month. And here I am after an intense day of work playing around on Plex, organising my digital music library: tweaking, listening, categorising, updating, re-arranging until my eyes get blurry.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Surely there are better things to do with my time than a ceaseless curation of an ever-growing collection of MP3 and FLAC files. I tell myself this every day, but it doesn’t seem to have an impact. I’m back at it the following day and the one after that.

What the hell is going on?

Maybe it’s early-onset dementia. Boredom is more likely, but then again, I feel some sort of joy and energy when I’m dicking around with all those files. When I’m bored, I normally take a walk. Not make sure that all 93 Bob Dylan albums are complete and in chronological order with full original artwork. Maybe I’m clinically depressed? I’ve been there. But this music obsession is not the same. Not even in the same universe.

What the hell is driving me to spend literally days (and when you start adding those up, weeks) staring into a screen perusing my 15 music libraries and 900 mixtapes for that next aural agate, the next musical thrill that makes me calm, exhilarated, inspired or awed.? A hit of dope that is more dope than ganja, drink and epiphany.

I’ve got to get to the bottom of this.

Though I don’t like to admit it, this obsession has the behavioral hallmarks of a young teen. And if there is one button I do not like having pushed it is the one that says, ‘you’re acting like a 13-year-old’. So that being said, it is probably the place to begin. Back in 1970, when I was 13 years old.

—

At that point in my earthly sojourn, I was living in India. I attended a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills and spent winter holidays on the vast riverine plain in a historic old city which at the time (before the Hindu nationalists went mad) was known as Allahabad. Our (tiny) family record collection was heavy on western classical, religious and folk music (Dylan, The Chad Mitchell Trio) and supermarket jazz ala Herb Alpert. At school Willie and the Poor Boys, Soft Parade, Abbey Road and Tea for the Tillerman were pretty much the constant soundtrack.

My dad took a business trip to Taiwan and brought back something called a cassette recorder. Pretty soon I was placing it right next to one of the small speakers of our ‘hifi’ set and committing Chad Mitchell to tape. This seemed as natural as grabbing a cookie on the way out the door. Both things were there. Waiting to be consumed.

The other characteristic of my musicophilia that appeared whole and pristine was a need to build a collection. This was completely unconscious; and the pool of albums from which I could build a collection was miniscule. But by the time I was 15, and living for a year in rural Kentucky, a huge part of my social life was spent talking about, sharing, borrowing, buying (thanks be to heaven for the Columbia Music Club) and refining a noise-reduced means of recording direct from the stereo speakers to a humble Sony cassette machine. My dreams were few and ephemeral in those days. But the music acquisition dream has never receded and indeed, as technology expands and the music industry collapses, it has metastasized into my geriatric obsession.

Has anyone ever studied the weird sense of pleasure one gets from simply admiring something? Like the thin spines of LPs, or the fatter (but shorter) spines of cassette tapes with the names of the mixtape or the artists hand scrawled in magic marker? Ditto CDs? Freud (of course) talked about this and (of course) suggested it could lead to a sort of madness. In psychology this affliction/pleasure is known as scopophilia or scoptophilia (Ancient Greek: σκοπέω skopeō, “look to”, “to examine” + φῐλῐ́ᾱ philíā, “the tendency towards”) is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person.

I’ve not been diagnosed but something very similar to this has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. And though my music collection was piffling for years I always drew sweet pleasure from simply staring at my albums, tapes or CDs. And crucially, (perhaps madly) dreaming of acquiring more. Some of us find the reward of staring to be sufficient unto itself. Others, like me, are driven by another need, to acquire that which we admire. Fortunately, for me this craving is limited only to music. I don’t understand it. I don’t claim to understand it. And it does strike me as unhealthy or strange (not eccentric. Strange.), but like addictions of every sort I can’t and don’t want to stop.

I did a bit of reading on the subject of collecting which it seems is A LOT more prevalent than I ever imagined. Between a third and half of Americans collect stuff. And I know from an old TV show here in Australia that Down Under is home to all manner of people whose homes are overflowing with their ‘passions’. Including the young blonde-haired host who we later learned collected child porn!

According to Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and sociologist, collecting is a “miracle”. And “what you really collect is always yourself.” Reassuringly, he tells us ‘collecting is an addiction. But he also considers it “an inborn and indestructible human trait.” Call it the madness that makes humans human.’

Collectors do their thing for all sorts of reasons. Novelty, kitsch, investment, intellectual stimulation etcetera. In an article from Psychology Today, the author nails what makes the most sense of my current music collection-philia. “The enjoyment of arranging and rearranging a collection can be the motivation for other collectors. Though this may serve as a means of control, it could also simply be the demonstration of organizational skills applied to collecting as taste and knowledge accumulate.”

There is a lot more I could say about this but I’ve got to get back to organising. I just found a new bit of software Collectorz.com that will hold me spellbound for the next few months!

I leave you with a mixtape of several songs about collecting, obsession with objects and similar such sillinesses.