Memory Full

 It's possible I just need to get my hard drive defragged, but recently I have begun to feel that I have no more room. It could be a hardware issue, but I have also begun to feel that it could just as easily be a software concern. 

I'm not talking about computers.

I'm talking about pop culture. I'm talking specifically about popular music. I look at my Spotify account and my CD collection and what I have downloaded on iTunes, Amazon and elsewhere and I notice that the songs and albums that I have collected over the years have a backward feel. Music from now is highly under-represented. Music from then I've got by the bushel. 

I just ran a check: Adam Sandler is fifty-four years old. He is a contemporary of mine. Which explains the soundtracks for his movies. There's a whole lot of Styx, some Gary Glitter, and some Cars in there. And don't get me started on The Wedding Singer. That one even included The Flying Lizards' cover of Money. I bought that record. Not the soundtrack. That would have been redundant. Because that was when I was still in discovery mode. 

At one point, all those sounds were new, and I brought them home and memorized them. I cherished them in the same way my mother savored her opera and my father his Odetta. I carried those with me but the songs I heard blasting from my older brother's room even more so. He used to give me the records that he tired of, or started to wear out. This is how I came by my Bachman Turner Overdrive and my first Elton John albums. I continued to wear them out. 

And I made all those Tuesday evening trips to the record store, poring over the new releases bin in hopes of finding the next great thing, or a piece of the puzzle that I had been missing. I carried this with me to California, when I moved here to start my own family. I can remember dragging my baby boy and patient wife with me on those pilgrimages to Tower Records. At this point, I had already begun replacing all of that vinyl that I had carted around from apartment to apartment and then halfway across the country with Compact Discs. Smaller. Lighter. With nearly illegible liner notes. That's when things began to slow down. All that regression, replacing the past began to consume me.

Until now, when I find myself scouring streaming services for the sounds of my youth. New music still appears weekly, but now it's on Fridays. But I don't feel as compelled to search out that new song to expand my horizons. I look for that missing single by DEVO that I used to have on a forty-five. It is a rare treat when a new artist breaks through and insinuates themselves in my ear canals. Someone who can drown out all that Styx.