CD = music/accesible community Shibuya Tower Records
In Shibuya, Tokyo there remains a Tower Records. Some may remember Tower Records from the 1990s. The Tower Records in Shibuya is massive, there must be some 6-8 floors of new CDs and vinyls. When I entered the building yesterday, I was mind-boggled and impressed! In the US, I haven't seen any major stores selling new CDs since the early 2000s. I had given up on CDs in 2012 when I left New Zealand and didn't want to travel with the weight. Since then, over the years, I had complained to family members and friends about how complicated it is nowadays to simply play an album. You can turn on Youtube or Spotify, but they're full of commercials, interruptions, and glitches. You can pay for those services, but who are you paying? Where? And even if you pay for those services, you still can't simply play the album chronologically, you have to make sure everything is charged, logged in to, or connected to Bluetooth (which for me, a hearing aids wearer, nearly always takes several attempts). Meanwhile an anonymous source take your cookies and personal data. And then you forget your password, or the internet is down, or your credit card expires, or they won't let you cancel!! Uggh!
I spent 9 years without music until two years ago when my other half gifted me a straight-forward single CD player. It's so easy, you just make sure it's plugged in, you push Eject, insert a CD, and that's it! It works 100% and it has made my life better. But it was tricky to find new CDs, most artists in the US don't sell their music in CD format anymore.
Returning to Shibuya on a hot sunny summer day. Tower Records. It was full of people of all ages browsing CDs, talking to their friends and the salespeople about albums, people listening to CDs together with store-owned headphones. Tokyo (so it seems to me) is good at maintaining things, especially older technology. What I saw at Tower Records didn't seem like a nostalgia fad or trend, but a continued and sincere interest in old and new music. Tower Records is obviously a business, but a pretty accesible (and now small) one where the positive social life seems to outweigh any harm. The CDs cost around what they costed in the 90s, $15-17 USD (plus 10% tax free discount for foreigners).
A couple observations occurred to me:
1) the face-to-face community that used to exist around music isn't there as much as it used to be. It might exist in Tokyo (with all their 165 live jazz cafes), and maybe in some college dorms, but I don't see it elsewhere. Sometimes people share Spotify playlists, and occasionally I will "save" something on Youtube, but I don't end up listening for the reasons above. The excitement and socialization are not there anymore, not like it was with a mixed tape/CD. Time has sped up, capitalism has become more exploitative, politics are in the way, and life has become more solitary and virtual. At Tower Records I ended up buying two new CDs (Japanese artists: Shibusashirazu and Humbert Humbert) and I got excited walking home with these in my backpack, I was going to enjoy this--albeit alone!
2) most albums are already uploaded to Youtube. So why buy the material form? For me, it was for convenience and to support the artist.
3) there's a shrine to Michael Jackson on the 7th floor of Tower Records alongside a table overflowing with fresh flowers.
