I’m someone who has a lot of fondness for old, obsolete media. In my office, I am surrounded by, let’s see, six different old computers that use 5.25″ floppy drives (ranging from 90K to 360K) as their primary storage medium, two that use two different formats of 3.5″ floppies, and between five and seven that use some manner of cassette-based storage. Then there’s all the different cartridge-based consoles, and even one that can also use these funny little cards. There’s an eight-inch floppy hanging on my wall, too, and a big Bullwinkle laserdisc down here. I clearly have some perverse love for old media. And yet, despite all this, I hate compact discs (CDs) and am happy they’re gone.
That’s right, I said it: fuck CDs. Granted, this take is probably at least a decade or maybe even two too late to, you know, matter, but I have been encountering more and more people who profess some nostalgia for those shiny discs, and to those people I just have to say, with all due respect, knock it off. CDs are not worth your nostalgia, because they’re charmless and clumsy and cumbersome, and it’s good we’ve moved on.
More specifically, I think CDs were especially garbage when it came to using them in cars, one of the best places to listen to music, period. I’m not just saying this from some elevated and removed position of objective assessment, this all comes from someone who was there, dammit, who lived with these things and wanted them to be great, only to be sorely disappointed.
I tried, dammit. I tried to like these things, because when they first hit the scene, it was genuinely exciting. The first commercial CD came out in 1982, and everyone lost their shit. It was being hyped all over the media, where they claimed it was the perfect new medium, completely resistant to dust and scratches, and would make everything else obsolete:
Much of this is, of course, absolutely true: lasers did read the music off the disc, they were compact, the audio quality was great, but everything about dust and scratch resistance was complete horseshit. CDs were fragile and annoying.
When I got my first CD player, the medium was about 6 or 7 years old; I started with cassettes in my first cars, a ’68 Volkswagen Beetle, soon to be replaced by a ’71 Super Beetle. I finally got a cheap portable CD player for my car maybe around my senior year of high school, and used one of those cassette adapters to connect it to my terrible Sparkomatic speakers I had clumsily installed in my doors.
That’s when I learned how absurdly sensitive CDs were to skipping. A Beetle is hardly the smoothest car in the world, but my cassettes never cared a bit about that. These princesses that were CDs, though, would panic at the slightest jostle, stuttering and restarting, and being unable to get through the first 10 seconds of a song.
Eventually, I came up with a solution like you see above, crudely illustrated from hazy memories. In order to get the damn thing to play any song I had to carefully fold at least two layers of impact-absorbing hoodies or sweatshirts or towels and place that under the CD player, which would then be placed squarely in the center of the passenger seat, so the cushioning and springing of the seat could help the process of coddling His Majesty The Great And Sensitive CD Player just right.
Of course, this was useless if you had a friend with you in the car, and the whole setup required near-constant maintenance and monitoring. But somehow I stuck with it, babying this absurd contraption for hours and hours on road trips, just so I could listen to, say, Hey or Lovecats or Rock Lobster at full volume.
Now, sure, many cars came with in-dash CD players, ones specifically engineered for the automotive environment, and those did not skip. They were vastly better. But, even with the right equipment, CDs still sucked.
The problem is that the physical form of a CD is simply not well-suited to being played in a car. The disc itself is far too fussy about how it must be handled. Remember holding CDs by their edges, being careful not to get any fingerprints on the bottom, because then it wouldn’t play? That’s ridiculous.
Drop one on your car’s floor? The CD is likely boned. Have any crap on your floormats that could scratch a sensitive CD’s surface? Of course you do, because everything could scratch them. Saying the word “grit” to a CD loudly enough could scratch it.
Compare that to plastic cassette tapes, which could be lost in your car for months, until finally found under a floor mat, partially adhered to the carpet via a combination of mud, grime, and probably some vomit. You could just pick it up, give it a quick perfunctory wipe on your pant leg to get off the biggest chunks, thunk it in the cassette slot on your head unit, and that motherfucker would play.
Not only that, but the packaging that CDs came in were awful, too. “Jewel cases” is what they were called, and they were miserable, miserable things.
Remember those? Even outside of a car, in the stable environment of a home on dry, non-seismic ground, they also sucked. If you had a stack of them, their nearly non-existent surface friction meant that every stack of three or more CDs was likely to come crashing down if you just looked at it too intently.
And whenever these cases encountered even the slightest bit of physical trauma, one or both of those little hinge tabs on the cover would break off, making the whole thing an even less stable mess.
Because these cases were such garbage, most people, especially for in-car purposes, would take their CDs out of the cases, then slide all of their CDs into these big binder things:
The binders themselves were a decent solution to the considerable problem of CD storage, but then you were left with big stacks of empty, usually somewhat broken jewel cases, which still usually had all of the album art and liner notes you wanted to save, so they just took up space somewhere, devaluing everything around them.
Yes, CDs let you jump to any track. Great. They could hold a good amount of music. Fine. I would have sacrificed either of those traits for a music medium that was less of a hassle to handle, use, store, maintain, everything. Cassettes were better. Vinyl records have their own kind of novel charm. What do CDs have?
Fuck-all, that’s what. Well, wait, I take that back: the lightning show they’d give when you put them in a microwave was pretty fun:
Aside from that, CDs were garbage, and I’m so glad not to have to deal with them anymore. For a good 20 years, these things were absolutely everywhere, and it was hell. I know it’s annoying to have to re-buy all your music on new formats, but I was happy to do it when everything went digital.
I get nostalgia for obsolete media. Of course I do. But I cannot give CDs that sort of attention, because they did not and never will deserve it. The current noncorporeal nature of modern music playing in cars, where everything is streamed from the internet or a USB drive or something like that may lack a certain character, but it’s so much better to live with.
So, if you’re young and being lured by the shiny, rainbow-reflecting allure of the CD, perhaps considering starting a semi-ironic collection of your own, hear this: stop. Don’t do it.
Go further back and collect cassette tapes, or even 8-tracks, which were also garbage but at least they were fun garbage. CDs are not fun. They’re the self-satisfied prima donnas of music media, and I will happily support launching all remaining ones into the sun.
So there.
