On a Facebook group I occasionally follow, a high school music production teacher wrote, “high school kids... they don’t buy music...they stream it. They don’t watch TV... they stream it... they don’t own anything... it’s $4.95 a month for this...and $9.99 a month for that... they are consumer nomads...” And some other stuff about what young people don’t care about, like in-depth synth programming, spending big money on a traditional DAW, music sales, and some aspects of traditional songwriting that may or may not be history. Without making any comments on this “teacher’s” literacy and familiarity with punctuation, it was food for thought.
At the opposite end of that kind of “consumer nomad,” is an old friend of mine who is so tied to his possessions that they are drowning him economically, socially, spiritually, and psychologically. Like a lot of the late-Boomers, he has some spare residual of the 60’s ethic but he has also clung to a lot of the 80’s materialist garbage and that creates a serious internal dichotomy. He has “collections” of everything from microphones to CDs (which he anally duplicates on to a huge hard drive system) to weird furniture to Eurotrash cars to tools he never uses to godknowswhatelse. Listening to him talk about his inability to clean up his act is one of the most painful things I have ever suffered. [And I have busted some large and small bones and had a collection of ailments and injuries that most people would qualify as “really painful.”] If he were moderately rational about his hoarding, he would at least build himself a House on the Rock in which to store it all. Of course, that would be a fairly outright admission of total insanity.
At this juncture in our semi-capitalist society, owning stuff seems more risky than worthwhile. Maybe owning a home (I mean owning a home, not renting one from a bank with a mortgage.) might be a fair gamble, but even that is risky depending on climate disasters, economic and political instability, and other hard-to-assess or foresee risks. Owning things like a CD or DVD collection makes no sense. Just look at the vast piles of cheap CDs and DVDs found in a 2nd hand store in practically every city in the world. They resell by the pound, or ton, in most places. Music is fungible, at best. Popular music is absolutely a commodity in every sense of the word. So much so that even the experience of a major concert holds about as much permanent space in your memory as does a business trip to
I admit that I am an unreformed hippy. For most of my life, one of my economic goals was to never own more than I could cram into a Ford E150 van and move cross country in one trip. Ideally, there would be room for me to sleep in that packed van, too. The fact that “the farm owns the farmer” holds true for most of the crap the rest of us collect and cling to. Possessions we don’t use are still there, taking up room, requiring some kind of maintenance, reminding us of our lost dreams, and taking their toll.
Owning stuff has a price. Having visited a few Millennial apartments I’d have to question their actual commitment to some kind of anti-consumer ideal. Four out of five of those apartments were crammed with crap from floor to ceiling and barely managed a narrow path from one necessary apartment function to another. Just because the stuff you collect is worthless doesn’t mean you aren’t materialistic. It just means you have bad taste.
But I totally get the few who realize that experiences are more valuable than stuff. Looking back over my own life, I can remember all sorts of things I once owned and thought were important that I lost, sold, or gave away. I don’t miss any of them and I’m still trying to figure out how little of what I own I can keep and still be satisfied. I have a poor memory, which might be a blessing, but the things I clearly remember are the experiences I had with people, some of those things, and places. Places more than anything, it turns out.
I can almost forget the nearly total misery of owning a Volkswagen Eurovan while remembering the smallest details of stepping out of my Winnebago Rialta into a cool, dry, clear New Mexico morning. I can look at a picture I took of myself several miles off-pavement in Utah with a flat tire on my motorcycle and no centerstand and fondly remember using rocks to prop up the bike while I pulled the wheel, repaired the tire, and backtracked to the highway. I know there was a lot of misery in that episode, but I mostly remember the feeling of independence when I rescued myself. I remember a few of the failures when I was learning guitar construction techniques, but I can instantly recall the pleasure of making an unplayable instrument into something a friend still plays fondly. Stuff (“your shit, my stuff”), including recorded music in any format, is easily replaceable. Today’s stars are tomorrow’s “where are they now?” stories. Maybe the music of your childhood brings back wonderful or terrible memories, but the memories are there with or without the music. Or, like me, you condense 73 years into about 40 minutes of stories and carry on.
