Tagged: 1994

The Alternative Version of that Bob Mould Song from No Alternative

Earlier today, during a break from grading papers and writing exams, I poked around my iTunes library and got a hankering for listening to some music from my youth. One title that came up was No Alternative, the compilation of “alt-rock” bands to benefit the AIDS charity Red Hot. Although it was released in late 1993, it made its impact in 1994—one of the greatest ever years in popular music—and most of the songs still resonate with my aging ears.

One of the songs on the compilation that has unsettled those same ears is Bob Mould’s “Can’t Fight It.” I closely listened to this meditation on breaking up because it seemed to fit the melancholic mood of this cool, foggy day in New York City. For years, I’ve listened to this song and there has been a moment of silence at about 1:02 into the song. It’s not a pause; it’s as if the audio is just missing.

Having bought the CD from a reputable dealer, I reasoned that the silence was a dramatic, though disruptive pause in the middle of a very emotional song. Although I knew very little about Husker Dü or Sugar, Mould always struck me as an unconventional artist so I thought the pause was part of this artistic intent.

I was wrong.

Years ago, I ripped the No Alternative CD into my iTunes library, and although I have been an iTunes Match subscriber since 2011, I didn’t much pay attention to the “Matched” status. In iTunes, “Matched” means that iCloud had recognized that track as “Can’t Fight It” and that it would play on any of my authorized devices, such as my iPhone or any other Mac I control. It also means that I can download a fresh copy from the iTunes store should I delete the original audio file.

Wondering whether the iTunes version had the same moment of silence I’ve heard for over twenty years, I deleted the mid-2000s–era rip I made from my copy of No Alternative and downloaded a copy from the iTunes Store. Not only did the iTunes copy sound a little “richer,” it also played without that silent moment.

Well, I’ll be damned. My CD was defective all this time. I wonder how many other people got a CD with this silent moment in such an emotionally touching song.

As a qualified audio purist, I now have a bunch of questions. Which is the authentic recording? Is it the one with silent pause from my twenty-one–year-old CD? Is it the uninterrupted version? Is this an issue on the cassette version?

Or, should I just be happy that after over twenty years, I finally listened to this song as it was originally intended?

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And Now I Feel Old

All this month, Soundcheck, the daily music show on our local NPR cash-cow WNYC, is airing a series on the music of the summer of 1994 because that was twenty years ago and, looking back, that was a pretty nifty year for music. That was also the summer after I graduated high school and eagerly anticipated my move to college.

Man, that was a long time ago.

To give you an idea of how long ago that was, most of my music listening happened in my car1, and my way of listening in a car seems downright antiquated. The centerpiece of my in-car music system was a $300 Sony Discman CD player that came with a three-second memory buffer. That memory prevented the CD from skipping anytime I hit a pothole.

The Sony CD Walkman (Discman) D-235 from the 1990s

I could power this device with batteries, but it would barely last an hour, especially if the buffer was being used, not nearly enough for a drive from my parent’s home in the Antelope Valley to my school in Santa Barbara. To keep the tunes going, I used a DC adapter. I know many people still use these to charge a phone or, if you’re a cab driver, a standalone GPS unit. The charging port in cars from those days was designed as a cigarette lighter because in those days, there were more people who smoked than people who used a handheld computer. Getting that outlet to power an electronic device was, I think, one of the most clever hacks ever devised.

Listening to the CD player through the car’s audio system required another hack using a car audio cassette adapter that connected to the line-out jack from my Discman. I would insert the other end, shaped like a cassette tape, into the tape deck. Also, with that adapter I was guaranteed backward compatibility: I could listen to cassettes and CDs, and I wasn’t forced to upgrade until I was tired of exhausting my tape deck’s cutting-edge features, such as auto-reverse and song seek.

With all this great hardware, of course, I had great software. In 1994, and years before the iPod, carrying my entire music library was virtually impossible. I needed to bring a small batch of CDs with me. In 1994, I probably owned about 200 CD but didn’t travel with more than twelve discs at a time.2 Every car trip required careful curation and anticipation about what my friends and I might want to hear many hours in the future. This might seem inconvenient today, but I really got to know my music back then, especially how good a particular band was beyond their hits.

After college, I found myself listening to music in my car less frequently. Santa Barbara and UCSB were particularly friendly to walking and cycling, and long drives with my friends became a rare thing. That combined with a move to New York City made riding in a car a less common occurrence for me that riding in an airplane. Whenever I get into a car today, I just turn the radio to the local NPR station.

As much as Soundcheck’s bidecennial retrospective on 1994 makes me feel like an old man, it at least confirms that my music is objectively better than anything these kids listen to these days.

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  1. Yes, this is the same guy who drives about 200 miles per year but pedals about 20x that. ↩
  2. I never got the 100-disc binders that held a chunk of every single CD I ever owned. That was a good thing, in retrospect, because at least two of my friends had their big binders stolen from their cars. Those were, without exaggeration, devastating losses. ↩