I am returning to the CD-filled, DVD-ruled, paperbacked and glossy-covered glory of the 80s and 90s and you’re coming with me. Good news: You don’t need a flux capacitor, a DeLorean, or Dr. Emmett L. Brown’s genius to get there. Nope. You just need to take a moment to remember how great our entertainment lives used to be and realize you can take it all back.
Here we go.
Remember those Case Logic CD cases you’d keep in your car? Remember unzipping that bad boy and seeing ALL your music in one place in those sleek white pockets? Remember CD cases and the artwork on the actual CD? Remember the feeling of sliding it out, double pressing the top of your CD player, snapping in a CD and letting it run for an hour?
Or burning CD mixes and coming up with cool/stupid names for them? Yes, I’m talking about “mixes” with a finite amount of room so you had to make cuts, not endless playlists on your phone someone else picked with dumb names like “Hip Hop Workout”.
Remember DVD towers? Those monumental, four-foot structures of cinema that stacked and displayed all your favorite movies. One glance from your couch and you saw them all. Goodfellas. Gladiator. Tommy Boy. Tombstone. Fight Club. The Matrix. Reservoir Dogs.
And we all had our own order: alphabetical, genre, most recent, favorites, etc…
It was up to you. They were yours. Forever. Organize ’em however you want.
Remember print books? Stacks of them on your nightstand and on your bookshelf, available to read whenever you felt like it.
Same with print magazines. They’d sit on your coffee table to flip through during TV commercials or in a little bin next to the toilet for your private reading pleasure.
Remember all that? Do you remember ever asking to give it up?
Neither do I. It just sort of happened. And now we need to reverse it.
I personally never left print books aside from a brief flirtation with the old Barnes & Noble ‘Nook’, but as for the rest of these, like you, up until a few weeks ago, they no longer existed in my life.
Instead, all my entertainment is buried in the zeroes and ones across a half-dozen devices and a dozen apps and services that serve you the illusion of owning things that you really don’t own.
You think you own the movie you bought on Google Play or the song you bought on Apple’s iTunes or the book you bought on your Kindle, but you don’t.
All you’re doing is buying what’s called a non-transferable license to use that piece of media under the terms and conditions of the company that owns the platform (Google, Apple, Amazon). If they choose not to carry that book or they lose the rights to it, so do you. If you want to watch/listen/read the thing you bought on another device, you can’t.
You’re renting your entertainment, not owning it.
Even worse, it’s all invisible.
Remember when you’d come home and be surrounded by all your favorite things? In your bedroom? In your family room?
Shelves of books. DVD covers and cases. CD covers and cases. Glossy print magazine covers on your table.
Remember how awesome that was?
Now?
Sure, you save space, but in the interest of saving space, you LOSE EVERYTHING ELSE: personality, artistry, ownership, collecting, curation.
Instead, you own nothing and shop for nothing and the algorithm feeds you a “show you might like” or a “people who listen to this song like this” and it’s all shit and it’s all hidden behind rectangular screens that vary in size from small enough to fit on your wrist to large enough to take up a whole wall and yet, despite the portability and seamless screen transitions, somehow, it’s still lacking in utility.
How many times have you sat back, turned on the TV, saw your home screen of Netflix, Peacock, Paramount, YouTube TV, HBO, Prime, Apple, Disney+, Hulu and on and on and sighed.
Which app was that show on? Where was I watching that movie? What did I sit down to watch again?
Or worse, one of your favorite movies pops in your head during the day so you decide to watch it that night. You turn on your TV and then search on your phone, “Where is True Romance streaming?”
Aaaaaannd it’s not streaming on any of the apps you pay for. Or it’s only available to “rent”, so you’re paying a zillion dollars for all these apps and they want you to pay another $3.49 to watch the thing they don’t have that you want?
So you don’t watch it out of spite.
Sound familiar?
The funny thing is that we had the solution to all of this nonsense for most of our lives and didn’t realize it until it was gone. What is that solution?
Simple:
We OWNED OUR SHIT.
Imagine a world where if you liked a movie or album enough you bought it. Oh yeah, we had it!
We collected stuff and owned stuff that we liked so that we could enjoy it any time.
Collecting is awesome. It’s human nature to own and display the things we like.
And we’ve sacrificed all of that for convenience. A brutalist sort of convenience where all of the media we like exists in the cloud with giant tech companies acting as the perpetual gatekeepers.
I, for one, am over it.
Of course, I’m a realist. I watch a good amount of sports and it’s nice when movies I like are actually on the streaming apps I have and there are a few shows I even watch as well, so I can’t ditch everything.
But I want to own my stuff again. I want to collect stuff again. I want to use the stuff I already own. I want to escape the streaming tractor beam and enjoy more stuff that doesn’t need WiFi and storage and updates and downloads.
In short, it took a while to realize it, but I liked my entertainment life better before in a period I am now dubbing B.S. (Before Streaming) and I’ve started going back and it rules.
Here’s how to easily and inexpensively live in the B.S. Era:
MUSIC:
After finding all of my old CDs a few weeks ago, I am officially done using my iPhone for music in my garage gym. Instead, I bought this old school Magnavox CD Player/Stereo for a whopping $39 and put it in the gym and brought out my old Case Logic CDs. I’ve got probably 30 mixes I burned and about 200 CDs from back in the day. I LOVE sliding one in and just letting it run. I have no idea what’s on half my mixes anymore and it’s such a pleasant surprise while I lift. Also, albums matter again in my world. Whole albums. The hits, the hidden gems, the interludes.
If you’ve got hundreds (or likely thousands) of dollars of CDs sitting in a closet somewhere in your house, I can’t recommend doing this enough. Take your music back!
You know what else I discovered? Record companies still make CDs and most are under $15. Even classics. My old DMX CD “It’s Dark and Hell is Hot” was scratched and I rebought it for $10. Felt great. And now it’s mine again. Forever.
I am toying with the idea of getting a portable CD player for running and stuff. That may be my next step backward to go forward.
MOVIES:
I bought my first DVD in almost twenty years the other day. I was leaving our local library and they had a bin of movies they were selling for a buck. On top was Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai, bonus Blu-ray Director’s Cut. I loved Samurai and remember owning the DVD a long time ago.
I dug up our Blu-Ray player in the closet and reconnected it over the weekend and put the movie on. No searching to see which app it’s on. No streaming or renting or buying the license to a digital device I don’t own.
Bonus: Tower Records and Blockbuster may be gone, but do you know where you can still go and physically walk through aisles of shelves with thousands of movies to pick from? Your local library! And here’s the kicker: you can rent the movies for free!
BOOKS:
Like I said, I never stopped buying physical books. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of hardcovers and paperbacks at home. I don’t care if they’re heavy or inconvenient. I’m happy to bring two or three books on a trip if I’m going to finish them. I can’t encourage you enough to read physical books – and this is from an author who knows we earn a higher royalty rate on our digital sales.
I don’t care. I believe books are meant to be read in physical form. Not on screens. Not with the entire internet of distractions behind it. Just you and your book and your brain.
Sounds good, right?
Look, the point isn’t to throw away your smartphone or cancel every streaming app tomorrow.
The point is to remember that we used to own our personal entertainment culture instead of renting it.
We curated stuff ourselves instead of being spoon-fed by an algorithm or gatekept by Silicon Valley. We collected stuff, stacked it, and lived with it every day. And we can do that again.
Go find your DVD player and pop in a DVD. Unzip that CD case. Stack a few magazines on the table. Build your bookshelf back up. Life is better when the things you love don’t vanish into the cloud but sit right there in your home, ready whenever you are. Welcome back to the B.S. Era.
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Jon Finkel
Editor-in-Chief, Midlife Male
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Check out my latest books at jonfinkel.com
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