Like Chocolate Cake, Like Cigarettes

If you sit down at Glorietta’s Food Choices food court long enough, you’ll notice that they keep looping two songs over their audio system. One is Bachelor Girl’s “Buses and Trains”, and the other is No Doubt’s “Simple Kind of Life”. It was only last Sunday, after several times of hearing them in the past few weeks that I sat or ate there, that I discovered that they were actually showing the videos of the two songs between ads in an elevated TV. How odd, I thought; I wonder why they don’t change them. But the food joint workers there must’ve tuned them out by now. Not that they’re not catchy, but, you know.

I actually had the Bachelor Girl album on cassette tape. I really like that song most of all, particularly the lines, “I know they’re bad for me but I just can’t leave them alone” and like some vices, “a man can kill and still be the sweetest fun”. Brilliant, brilliant.

About three years ago, though, I ran out of blank tapes for my recorder, so I used that for an interview. I think I may have promised myself to get a replacement copy of that one day, along with new copies of the second Merril Bainbridge and Tara McLean albums, which I had to use for different assignments. But I'm not really sure.

I discovered their still-intact lyric sheets and cases piled in a dusty part of my room. I cleaned that up a few hours ago. I just transferred most of my old, now-unused tape collection onto a shelvable plastic container with wheels that no one was using. The items ranged from stuff I got back in high school, to those I bought dirt-cheap in 2003, as well as recordings of interviews with celeb and non-celeb subjects. The collection was yet another colorful, mnemonic map that triggered memories of specific events and phases.

I didn’t really organize in any order; I just needed to get them together into the plastic box. I stopped every few minutes of stacking to look at them. There were Lilith Fair ladies (Sarah McLachlan, Indigo Girls, Sinead O’Connor, Sheryl Crow, etc.) mingled with some new wave albums (the Beggars’ Banquet Collection, River Detectives, The Cure’s Disintegration, etc.), pop ones (Billy Joel’s Storm Front, Wilson Phillips, Richard Marx’s first album!), techno and electronica-related acts (John Digweed, Gus Gus, etc.), and soundtracks (Go, Pretty in Pink, Twin Peaks, etc.).

“Through times of joy and suffering, the music flavors everything”, goes a line from Human League’s “Soundtrack to a Generation”. How true, especially for me. Music has been, and will always be, important to me. Even after I’ve moved on to CD’s (basically because the tape players have stopped working, among other reasons), the countless songs will continue to express words I connect with or need to say, or provide pounding rhythms that soothe my mind and calm my nerves.

The last CD I bought was Vienna Teng’s Warm Strangers, a few months back. I’ve also been enjoying Gumby’s great mix CDs too, which compile my personal ‘80s-to-present pop, folk, new wave and corporate rock favorites. Most of them are songs I previously had as tape tracks. Others are songs I missed from way back. But each song has sentimental worth.

One day, I’ll be moving on to a trusty gadget that compresses all the songs I need to hear in my lifetime. I honestly can’t see that happening any time soon, but I gotta admit, I never saw myself eventually owning a CD collection, however small, back when vinyl records were the coolest thing, either.