She wants to sell the music for less; he wants to buy it for much more. She wants to dispose off the singles collection of her husband—who ran away with her daughter’s friend—on a shoestring, send the money across to the runaway man in Spain, and in the process, not leave him with enough cash to allow him to return to her in London. Good riddance—to both husband and his music. He, the owner of a used record store, knows what the collection, which includes a 30-year-old James Brown single, fan club-only Beatles and You Left The Water Running by Otis Redding, is worth and bargains hard to pay more for them. The irony of situations plays on in Nick Hornby’s tragicomic novel, High Fidelity, with finally money exchanging hands in lieu of that Redding single. But what the hell do we do with the huge pile-up of outdated music that has filled up every little nook in our rooms? Well, the music isn’t quite passé — Traffic, CSNY, Neil Young, Jethro Tull, REM and Queensryche still continue to be relevant to the ear. What is passé is the format: cassettes. What do we do with them? Do also enlighten, what do we do with the old tape recorder, the hi-fi stereo sound system, the portable cassette player with its five-band graphic equalizer and the CD player? What the hell do we do with the spanking new portable MP3/CD player, yet unblemished by any scratch, now that music fits into the palm, in a player the size of a matchbox, and through which The Who’s My Generation sounds just the same, maybe digitally crispier? At Chotu’s inconspicuous music store on Kolkata’s Free School Street , they have stopped buying used cassettes, many years after they stopped buying used long playing records. Rows and rows of CDs and MP3s line up against the wall there and Weather Report’s Black Market conveniently sidles up to Beatles’ The White Album. Yet, Chotu too is feeling the pinch now that the wafer-thin compact disc is cumbersome compared to a single digital music file, click-click downloaded, wink-wink copied, and stored and played through something as simple as the iPod. What will Chotu do with those brilliant CDs in his shop, especially in this era, when since the second paragraph of this article till now, Otis Redding’s You Left The Water Running downloaded itself on to my computer’s hard disk? Technology is leaving us helpless. The wink-and-miss speed of its encroachment is leaving us with a stash of electronic garbage around the corners of our rooms, making small rooms seem smaller. The notorious floods of Kolkata took with it our old family record player, otherwise that too would have added to the clutter of gadgets made unnecessary by the digital age. The cassette player stutters, the spool of the tapes are heavy from under use and loosen up only when fingered or pencilled, the CD player does not support MP3s and the portable MP3 player does not support downloads. And there is the iPod, thousands of songs compressed into the little nothing, waiting to be heard, one of them being Voice by the Indian electronic rock band, Pentagram. When the band decided to upload the song on the Internet so that fans can interpret the song through their own videos, Pentagram was only skimming the surface of the next upheaval in music delivery systems, says Vishal Dadlani, frontman of Pentagram and one half of the music composer duo, Vishal-Shekhar. He talks about a situation in the future when “no music companies will make money, and only listeners and musicians will be shareholders”. New Zealand-based Warren Mendonsa, who made his name as the guitarist with Mumbai-based rock band Zero, has already tested the waters by uploading his entire album, Nights in Shining Karma, on the site blackstratblues.com from where audiences can download and even make a voluntary payment. SF Karim, business manager at Saregama, gives the audio cassette another three years. He does not want to hazard a guess for the compact disc, at least not yet. “Worldwide cassettes are a dead format. Equally true is the fact that even the iPod will be outdone sometime. Where do we stop?” asks Karim. Maybe we will go with the flow. Or maybe, like Amit Guha in Kolkata who has built an archive of rare old music LPs and organises listening sessions, remain insulated from a time that has left us with enough options to download and listen but little time to do so. You know, listen in the good old lights-dimmed-cassette-cover-in-hand-and-images-on-the-mind, way. There is something to be extracted, yet, from silly nostalgia.
