Hi-Fi Highs, Low-Tech Lows

In which I am left stranded

By Zach Hively

Are you in northern New Mexico? Come say hi this weekend! I’ll be set up with my publisher, Casa Urraca Press, in the artists’ mercado at the El Rito Studio Tour.  

I am my own man. You can’t pin me down to any one taste, or any single allegiance. Like Neil Young said, “I don’t sing for nobody.” Because he is always right and I agree with everything he does, I believe in staying true to myself and only myself.

One of the things I do to stay true to myself is to purchase every new Neil Young album, which I’ve done since 1999 or so, when you could get them at a magical place called Hastings. I listen to them the whole way through, in my own uninterruptible sanctum, liner notes in hand. 

These rituals used to happen with CD releases, though for the last ten or fifteen years I have adapted, like any good American does, to the latest cutting-edge technology for most new album drops. Neil Young puts out enough new music that the modern large-format liner notes that come with these newfangled vinyl records are probably the main reason I still don’t need glasses.

For this latest record with Crazy Horse, called Fu##in’ Up, I was feeling nostalgic for the CD format. Not least of all because it is cheaper, while still provoking a certain tactile satisfaction I have yet to glean from old-school streaming. I sliced open the cellophane, popped a beer, and slid the still-as-yet-unsmudged CD into my--

—into my--

—into nothing, because I no longer own a CD player.
That’s okay. An impromptu road cruise also affords a superlative first-listen experience. I jumped into my car and fed that now-slightly-smudged CD into my--

—into my--
—into my realization that CD players are not, and have not been, standard automotive features since sometime in one of the Obama administrations.
What a world we live in. CDs (the investment ones) are sitting at 5% interest rates, which incidentally is probably the current-day percentage of households with functioning CD players.

Now, I hardly live a life of American excess. I have only two vehicles, for instance, and the one without Bluetooth capabilities plays cassettes, but only in one direction these days.

Yet technology has left me behind in even this most fundamental way, if neither my car, nor my other car, nor my computer, nor my other computer, nor my stereo, nor my alarm clock, nor my telephone, nor I, with the world’s knowledge at my fingertips, can play a single CD, once heralded as both a durable and a portable audio medium.

But I, as my own man, refuse to change my ways just because technology doesn’t support them anymore. Besides, it’s nothing a quick trip to Radio Shack can’t fix.

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