Stampeding Through the Decades

For the past thirteen years or so, I've been a huge fan of Rhino Records and their products. It started for me on my 30th birthday with their Have A Nice Day: Super Hits of the 70's collection - a twenty-five volume CD series that really covered all those niche and one-hit wonders of the 1970's very well. I was in a rather nostalgic mood at the time and this set was perfect for me. And it really was "love" at first sight...er...listen.

From there, I branched out into two 80's collections that Rhino also had: Just Can't Get Enough: New Wave Hits of the 80's and Radio Daze: Pop Hits of the 80's. The former is a fifteen volume collection of some of the most known and quite a few forgotten new wave jems up through the middle of the 80's. The later was a five volume set that really featured some lighter pop hits of the same time - a nice compliment to the earlier 70's set. I was rather hoping this second 80's set would catch on and that more would come, but alas that wasn't the case. It must not have been as popular.

I was rather content with all of these disks, for they filled in holes in my CD collection rather nicely. As I said, a lot of the songs on these were hits by artists that didn't chart that often - so they were a nice alternative to hunting down any greatest hits sets. And, more likely, these collections are probably some of the only times some of these songs have even been made available on CD.

However, Rhino came back into my life again this past week. As you know, I've been prepping files on my PC from my CD collection so I'll be ready for my iPod come the holidays. What I realized, in going through my music, is that while the 70's and 80's were very well represented (and that makes sense too as that was my years of youth through young adulthood) I was lacking a lot of stuff from the 90's. In browsing around, I ran across another Rhino set - Whatever - the 90's Pop and Culture Box set. I luckily found it for half price so I couldn't resist getting this seven disk, 125 song set. Unlike the earlier sets, this 90's set seems to be more of a sampling buffet rather than a more focused, genre menu that the others provide. The 90's music scene included so many styles - pop, rock, R&B, rap, alternative, grunge, etc. - and this set tries to sample as much of those as it can. What you get is kind of a mish-mash of music that doesn't flow as seemlessly as other collections.

Some may look at Rhino's reissue offerings as sort of the K-Tel records of the 21st century (how many of you are old enough to get that reference?). For me, I'm okay with that. They've done the work to hunt down these various songs and make them available in affordable collections. Their selections may seem odd on the surface, but after many listening sessions you realize they've plucked some of these songs from the abyss for old fans and future fans alike to enjoy.

Now, I need to see what their 60's offerings are like....

CD's Silver Anniversary

The Compact Disk celebrated it's 25th anniversary on Friday of last week. The first ones rolled out of a production plant in Germany in August of 1982, and the world of music (and data storage) has been forever changed.

I remember the days of vinyl and cassettes very well. As a teenager, I would love rushing to Record Giant in the plaza to spend hard earned money buying the latest 45 singles or albums. When I was in college and didn't have the space to be hauling around turntables and large boxes of records, cassettes were the cheaper alternative. My co-op job in New Jersey during the summer of 1985 was really when I got a lot of new music on tape. But tapes would break, and vinyl could get scratched easily.

I remember when CDs started to appear in local record stores I'd visit post-college in 1989. At the time, they still only took up a small section of the stores. Christmas of 1990, the first Christmas after my wife and I got married, she bought me a six-disk CD changer component for our home stereo system (she spent a lot of money for it too as they were quite expensive at the time). One of the first CDs in our collection was the four-disk Led Zepplin box set that had just been released. I was hooked!

Initially I focused on replacing albums that I had on vinyl or cassette - to have the better recording quality. Prince was one of the first artists whose whole catalogs I quickly sought. Most other folks I would get greatest hits collections as they were released to suffice - to have those most known songs in the new format. I joined my share of CD clubs too (remember when they were called 'record clubs'?) - BMG and Columbia House. It was very easy to build a collection quickly when you were getting 14 disks for a dollar.

When the CD-RW drives started showing up on computers in the late 90's and beyond, that just opened up a whole new window. No longer would I need to worry about hundreds of floppy disks which too easily got messed up (one good magnet and boom - data gone). I could burn lots of data onto a single, shiny disk. I don't know how we ever survived without them?

Today, a CD player in the car is a must (the week I had to drive my in-laws car, when my Suzuki Sidekick was on it's last legs, I nearly went bonkers because their Suzuki did not have a CD player. I was forced to listen to the radio the entire time.). My clock radio for years has been one with a CD player in it - I wake up every morning usually to the first notes of whatever song it is set to on the disk. Every boombox we have in the house now has a CD player in it. And I'm sure a lot of people can relate to all this too. There is a whole generation out there who do not remember a time when CDs weren't around (I seemed to have said the same thing a few weeks ago about MTV too).

Will there come a time when CDs will go the way of the 78rpm record (or vinyl in general) or the beta tape? Probably. But in the meantime, I'll just happily enjoy this wonderful little invention of the last quarter century.