there goes the music (and my youth?)

it was excruciating to throw out my tapes today- over a 1000 collected over 20 years. from the early boney m and then michael jackson to the madonna collection to the pink floyd and door phase and then the bob dylan and bruce springsteen obsession and then there was prince- always prince.. and all those ‘singles’ tapes – collected , sorted, arranged.. until i started concentrating on cds instead – and mow mp3s.

i have always been one for obsessive indexing. even today my mp3 collection is all (almost) sorted, indexed and corss indexed. the hindi songs were giving me some trouble but then i managed with a lot of help from mukul (the hindi film song encyclopedia) and the internet.

anyway the tapes were rotting away and becoming completely moldy in the cupboard. i had not heard them in ages and i could not see myself listening to them either. they had to go and putting every tape away one by one into an ever increasing pile was like tearing way my fingers one by one. there was no point in letting myself be overcome by sentiment, so i steeled myself against all emotion and out they went. for sentimental reasons i did keep some of the inlay covers though.

being a music fan and not too much of a sportsperson because of my odd feet when i was growing up my entire childhood and youth has been punctuated with pop. i suspect that so much of who i am today to do with the pop posturings of my rock idols when i was growing up… whether that’s the brazen sexuality of madonna or even the heart on sleeve sentiment of bob geldof. i don’t know how they influenced me but i am sure that they did.

bruce springsteen said it best in ‘no surrender’ from ‘born in the usa’ a fabulous rock record-…“i learnt more from a three minute record than i ever did in school”.