And You Say You Never Pirated Music


Long before Spotify began bombarding us with its corny, annoying ads, consumption of music was supplemented by the many music piracy sites, many of which no longer exist. 


Just the other day, I was decluttering an old, 8GB memory card when I came across the 'My Music' folder. Opening it felt like being greeted with the same feeling of ecstasy that hits you when you discover an old DVD from a pile of dusty old souvenirs. I gladly dived into its wistful warmth, scrolling through the tons of tracks in the folder, downloaded from various websites (some with rather strange names), spanning across different genres, artists, and of course, file sizes. 


The lack of interminable internet availability back in middle school meant that I had to consistently stock up on offline downloads for those midnight jamming sessions on my old Nokia Lumia. 



Youtube to Mp3 was a hot favorite. Often long minutes of searching (in vain) for the right download button on mp3 piracy sites would force the teen music connoisseur to resort to Good Ol' Youtube. Unlike now, when can you stream your favorite band's latest release seconds after it hits the world wide web, back then (I might have just spoken like our parents when they describe their strenuous schoolgoing journeys), I would indulge in blissful moments of scrolling through music blogs, many of which would contain direct links to download the tracks. 


Then there were those snatches of tunes recorded off FM Players in between talk shows and traffic updates. Be it the latest Bollywood number or the last few lines of an old favorite, I would waste no time in pressing the record button in hopes of eternalizing a few seconds of eargasm before the song dropped. 


Spotify might have been the answer to piracy, but it is nevertheless a very inconvenient alternative. Earlier this evening, I discovered that two of my favorite albums were apparently 'unplayable' on Spotify. I will admit that I did need an excuse to start a rant on music consumption in context of the previous decade, and what better than a bug destroying your mood on a lovely evening? 


Come to think of it, this tirade probably stemmed from that brief moment of sadness that accompanies the rigorous activity of deleting some 2.5GB worth of pirated music. 

Comparative Literature major, self-certified coffee connoisseur.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Clockwork Orange

Image
"W e had undefined spaces to live our childhoods in, as long as we were home by dark"  The blue notebook, half-filled with attendance policies, dress code policies, and cell phone policies, the 'late fine' slips, and the cleverly concealed rubber bands that kept our saggy socks in place have synthesized into a dyschronometric actuality- three lectures punctuated by four treks to the tea-shop, a four-minute lunch of frozen grilled cheese and a near-empty conference room at sundown forcibly- and spitefully- cutting short the valedictory speech. More importantly, this cataclysmic shift to a disaggregated, nebulous  time -web was followed by a more extensive understanding of the temporal standardization that the entire organizational culture of the school system relied on. And one that I had somehow managed to flee from, in the three-and-a-half hours of cassette-hunting that was effectively squeezed in between two classes. Clock hours and calendar days have gradually fade
Read more

Language as a Witness

Image
  "Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl."  An extremely dubious claim, that one. Or so I believe. How does one tame language- how does one make language tremble with desire? How does one fish out from its universal inadequacy, the artful conceits that ornament the utterances of war-mongers? How does one filter language into white squares of grief, and how does one stretch it across 1.5 million acres of mutilated life-worlds?  Language is a refugee camp supervisor; language is a discarded relic of identification buried in the rubble. Language is the misplaced  nuqta نقطہ   that turns aab آب into aap آپ, disrupting- while also equating- life-forces.  Language is a unresponsive lover; language is the matchmaker of disjointed signifiers. How do you discipline language; how do you make its unruly metaphors line up to form the defining sonnet of an epoch? The word, out here, is the overlord. Patiently overseeing the twisted grafting of huma
Read more

What is The Lazy Eye?

Image
"The Lazy Eye" (originally "The Calcutta Nomad") was created in 2020, as a space to catalogue a compilation of local myths and legends collected from my many excursions to former zamindari estates in rural Bengal.   While the blog has long strayed from its original purpose, it now serves as a journal-of-sorts, as I try and document my work on sound archives, home-spaces and memory. Well, mostly the second.    This blog is home to micro-essays, a truckload of academic jargon, and a documentation of everything that catches my 'lazy eye'. Here's my  Substack.  :) الامان
Read more