A Pirate Looks at Eighteen

Yes, I am a pirate, two hundred years too late

Two of the best albums to ever play in my 1987 Honda Civic via my Aiwa CD player were suspiciously procured. I think if my parents ever found the original artwork of one of the CDs - I would probably never be allowed to purchase a CD again. Those two CDs were Dr. Dre's 2001 and Outkast's Stankonia. What they had in common - they were both copies of the original. They were both purchased in the high school parking lot, out of the trunk of a car, from a classmate. Each CD was $5. With his parent's wise and innovative purchase of a computer with a CD-RW drive, he suddenly had found a sustainable revenue source and minor celebrity. We had become digital pirates and bootleggers - in small-town Indiana.

My precious binder of CDs was no longer filled with the beautiful, immediately-recognizable artwork of classic 90s albums. It was now filled with silver and gold colored CD-Rs marked up with a Sharpie. What started out with single albums being copied quickly turned into precisely-mixed CDs. The days of taping off the radio were gone. In my opinion, Napster was at partially the reason for the decline of the music industry, but really - for a kid like me - it was the CD-RW burner drive. For the price of one CD, I could now have three. CDs were exchanging hands at my school like - well...use your imagination. You wanted a copy of the latest Limp Bizkit's release? - $5. Copies were everywhere.

This image above was suddenly the biggest purchase you could make - even if you did not have a rewriteable drive at home. You could take a few of these to a friend's house and you could look through his collection and "burn" your favorites. Computers were being built with more storage, rewritable drives, and Napster. Way before iTunes was launched, we knew that the need for a whole album was quickly fading away. The way we approached buying music was changing - or should I say not buying music. I had a copy of Jack Johnson's Brushfire Fairytales before it was even released. 

Napster was quickly eroding away - the feds and Lars Ulrich were hot on the trail. A simple search for Tupac was no longer - you had to type in Toopac or 2Pac. Nine Inch Nails became 9 Inch Nails or 9 In. Nails. I was becoming a huge Barenaked Ladies fan and in order to get the tracks I wanted - I had to type it in as BaReNaKeD LaDiEs. The feds were catching on, but there were certainly workarounds. Spelling and letter arrangement was one. As long as T1 lines existed on campuses all over America - file sharing was alive and well. It did occur to me that stealing someone else's artistic work was wrong, but I never thought I would get caught. I have mentioned it in earlier posts, but my generation was certainly brought up in a world of digital piracy. A world our parents had no idea how to respond to. In that world, it was ok to take someone else's music without paying for it - Why? - because we enjoyed their work.  I can remember people being upset with Lars Ulrich from Metallica due to his stance on Napster and file sharing. People revolting on Metallica??? I quickly heard about and moved on to Kazaa once Napster was shut down. Take a look at this Wikipedia page - the amount of file sharing sites/programs that launched between 2000-2002 is astounding. Once you had a taste for downloading what you wanted - it was tough to wash out. 

It's amazing to reflect on the evolution of how we enjoy music. I love listening to the decade channels of SiriusXM each morning all because with a simple click I can enjoy six decades of music. The message of music has not changed, but the format we enjoy it in has undergone a tremendous evolution. Vinyl records to 8 tracks to cassettes to CDs to copied CDs to illegally downloaded songs to purchased songs on iTunes to streaming - it all has the same purpose - to fit your mood. And just like everything else, the pendulum always swings back. I now take immense pride in my vinyl collection and a fellow teacher and I were just marveling over his 8 Track collection the other day. 

I wish I had that 87 Civic back (and the gas prices that came with it), but I do still have the majority of my copied CDs. For a person who remembers way too much - it is all about the memories within that silver Maxell. The immediate transportation to a time I cannot get back. 

To conclude this post and to also humble myself - I fondly remember those CDs I created for others - namely girls I liked. A learning experience and a source of laughter and embarrassment. Nothing says I want (or more importantly hope) to be in a relationship with you like creating a CD with either what you perceive to be her favorites or ones that you think she'll like (bad idea). I leave you with one of my favorite quotes about mixtape creation from one of my all-time favorite books and movies - the quintessential High Fidelity. 

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again […] A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick it off with a corker, to hold the attention […], and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, […] and . . . oh, there are loads of rules.

56KBPS

One of the staples of any household in the 90s was a desktop computer. I'm pretty sure it cost a fortune at the time and had little memory, but it was literally a gateway to the world. I have fond memories of my dad installing Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego and playing SimCity (hold the Shift key and type "FUND" for $10,000). I always marveled at his mastery of the DOS command box (c:/). We had a Gateway 2000 at my house, and they seemed like they were everywhere at the time. They even had brick and mortar stores. I think part of that had to do with the fact that my dad worked for the school system and we were familiar with them since they were everywhere in schools. We had dial-up internet provided by GTE running at a blazing 56kbps per our modem. The internet was obviously was fledgling in the late 90s, but two specific applications really changed things for me forever. Those two - ICQ and Napster.

With the introduction of Napster and ICQ, the computer quickly changed from a pure information/entertainment medium to a rabbit hole of time-wasting overnight - purely due to the internet. If you are not familiar with ICQ, it was essentially the first online instant messenger. Its icon was a flower and you were assigned a unique user ID number, much like a phone number. When you wanted to connect with people via ICQ you had to give them this number. The flower icon had different and different icons associated with it to indicate your level of availability to chat. This meant that the days of actually having to call a girl on her home phone were long gone. You didn't have to worry about some girl's dad picking up the phone on the other end of a little brother or sister listening in on your conversation. Similar to how teenagers use text messaging and apps on the phones without ever actually talking to someone. I felt like I used ICQ for many years and really did not get into AOL Instant Messenger until I was in college. Looking back, ICQ, meant the first time where I started to assume how people felt about me purely based on online interactions (based on an icon, an availability color, or a non-response).

I will most likely have many posts about Napster simply because it was such a big deal to a kid with limited disposable income. To say it was a game-changer for a music lover is a gross understatement. Not only was it an amazing medium to illegally obtain music, but it also indicated a culture shift. It introduced the modern pirate. Long gone were the days where I had to scrounge up $15 to purchase a CD. I could now just download individual songs that I liked and listen to them over and over without any cost. This obviously was dependent on the very limited space on my Gateway 2000's hard drive :). Like many my age, that did not have access to a T1 line, you woke up each morning, opened Napster, and tried to find a college kid's stream who had the song that you wanted and click download. You really hoped for someone who had a T1 line on the other end, even a DSL, but you would definitely take a hard swallow and settle for someone with a 32kbps connection if it really was a song that you wanted. There was one obvious caveat to all of this. My parents wanting to use the phone. I can remember many times being 75% of the way done downloading a song and my mom would pick up the phone and completely cut off our modem's connection - thus stopping the download. That simple. I then crossed my fingers that I could find another acceptable connection to finish out the rest of the download. That bonus track from your favorite artist that was only found on the Japanese release would have to wait.

It definitely was the wild west days of the internet. I think that many in my generation are such proponents of net neutrality because we grew up very much rooted in a culture of Internet piracy. We weren't taught digital citizenship - we were flagbearers on the Queen Anne's Revenge. You can't tell us what to do with our internet :). We were not accustomed to paying for things that we could find free. I continued to download songs illegally all the way into college until it actually hit home that students at my university were being fined thousands of dollars for illegally downloading songs. Money I did not have and a risk I was no longer willing to take.

I can still picture it. Me sitting in front of our desktop, playing Command and Conquer, chatting with some friend on ICQ, and downloading Len's Steal My Sunshine (not buying that CD).