You Spin Me Right Round

Rear cover art (G, Garbage, 1995)

The final track of the album fades out. The laser assembly returns to its starting position with a whir and the disc slows to a halt. All that remains is the faint hum of the speakers. The disc ejects and you place it back in the case, glancing at the artwork before slotting it back into the rack.

The older generations oft pine for the crackle of vinyl and the large elaborate cover art, and I sympathise as someone who has undergone the rite of digging through parents' vinyl collection. Our attitudes to distribution media are more tied up with memory and nostalgia than any qualitative superiority as some audio enthusiasts are always attempting to prove. Whilst technological progress enables me to carry one and a half thousand songs on my old 8GB iPod Nano, which is a hell of a lot more than the 8 track decks my Dad remembers, my own musical experiences in the 90s bind me to the compact disc.

It's roughly fifteen years since my first CD, which was embarrassingly Spice, The Spice Girls (1997). The first musical purchase is almost always a novelty - my brother bought The Teletubbies theme, so don't judge me. My first single surely makes up for that immature acquisition - in terms of airplay Hey Boy Hey Girl still holds up, as does the parent album in my opinion. However, for me it's the fourteenth album in my collection that marks the step onto a more mature sound, hence the above image. I bought G around October 1999 mostly because Stupid Girl was still in heavy rotation on the local radio station and As Heaven is Wide was on the Gran Turismo soundtrack. I haven't got a review lined up here, nor some insight into the lyrical themes on the album; I just used to stare at Shirley Manson posing on the back cover whenever I listened to it. That's an enduring memory of holding a bit of hinged plastic and having some adolescent thoughts, but it means something to me. I can't get that experience from buying mp3s from Amazon, even though they come with artwork embedded. I still can't get that experience from loading cover art onto my tiny screened iPod.

Of course, I'm not looking at those images anyway because the entire point of a portable music player is listening on the go; but even using the PC and iTunes in place of a hi-fi, artwork seems like a relic if it isn't something you can grasp. You could blame the shuffle function, though the truth is most people can't be bothered or don't have time to listen to an entire album and sit there with the artwork in hand, reflecting on the music. You can blame the transformation of music into a literal soundtrack of one's life. I'm just as guilty as everyone else in compulsively wearing white earbuds. Despite that and the compact disc and cassette before it, vinyl hasn't died out - it simply moved from the mainstream distribution into a niche. Similarly, there's no reason to fear or herald the imminent death of the CD - there are plenty of physical albums out there cheaper than their digital alternatives, the bonus being that you can maintain a hard copy and rip the tracks to a device. Something always lives on in the long tail.

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