Times Keep Changing but the Music Must Never Stop

 

From the beginning of time – well, at least the beginning of my time on this planet – music has been one of my most favourite things. Everything, from Hindi film music to ghazals to English Pop, Rock, Disco, Techno, EDM, House, Latin, Reggae, Rumba, Flamenco, Salsa… and probably more. I started off with listening to the radio and have since then worked my way through LPs, cassettes, CDs, MP3s and FLACs. In fact, I’ve never taken to streaming music platforms like Spotify etc., and still listen to MP3s and FLACs using Winamp. Otherwise, it’s YouTube. But I guess that’s how it is for each generation of listeners – we’ve all had our own different ways of discovering new music, buying it (or acquiring it otherwise, via means that may or may not be entirely legal) and playing it on different devices.   

For my 16-year-old son, ‘music’ is all about streaming his favourite tracks on Spotify. He discovers and plays all his favourite music on Spotify – that app being the centre of his musical universe. Other elements in that universe include his Android smartphone, a pair of Bluetooth headphones, an Amazon Echo smart speaker. As far as I can remember, he’s never heard music played on a CD player. In fact, he may not even have seen a standalone CD player and might never have seen an actual music CD. Music cassettes had more or less disappeared from mainstream use a decade or more before the time he was born. And as for LPs – vinyl records – I suppose most kids of his age won’t even recognize those, and most would’ve never seen a turntable in their lives. Theirs is a generation accustomed to choosing and immediately playing any track, from any artist in the world, immediately, at the mere touch of some kind of a screen on some digital device or the other. For them, to have to muck around with actual physical media – flipping through stacks of CDs, cassettes or records, finding what they want to play, putting it on the player, and then going to the trouble of fast-forwarding or reversing through the tracks – may well be quite unimaginable. And maybe that’s a good thing. This generation will not need to know the heartache caused by spools of tangled magnetic tape and scratched CDs or LPs.

Things were a bit different when I was growing up, back in the 1970s. There was no Internet access, no websites of any sort, no social media, no smartphones. Everything was analogue, not digital. In order to ‘discover’ new music, one browsed through the local music stores’ collection of LPs, and in the ’80s, cassettes. My own earliest memories of music go back to Murphy and Sanyo radios that we had in the house, listening to popular Hindi film songs that were broadcast on All India Radio at that time. There was no FM radio in India back then – only AM was available – and the sound quality of our small, cheap radio players (also called ‘transistors’ at the time) couldn’t have been very nice. But none of that mattered one bit, as generations of listeners in the country grew up listening to these radios – it was music to our ears, every bit of it.

My father was actually quite fond of music – especially ghazals – and had a fairly large collection of vinyl records of different sizes, each having a different playback speed. In the evening, when he came back from work, we would settle down next to our HMV record player. This was a compact unit with a built-in mono (not stereo) speaker, and the player itself looked like a very small leather suitcase when closed. He would select a record and take it out of its jacket (the artwork on which alone would make most of those jackets very collectible today!), place the record on the player, select the playback speed via a rotary dial and carefully position the needle on the specific track he wanted to listen to. Both sides (sides A and B) of each record were playable and from what I can remember, each side could hold maybe five or six songs. My father, always an exceptionally kind and softhearted man, would usually only listen to music for around half an hour in the evening, but that half hour was a bit special and he expected a bit of peace and quiet during that time. I was only too happy to sit beside him, quietly, and enjoy listening to all those LPs.

Being the audiophile he was, my father must have eventually felt the need for better quality of music and decided to get a ‘stereo system’ for the house. For this, he got a loan of Rs 3,000 (a fair chunk of money in the late-1970s) from his office, and one Sunday morning we got on his trusty Bajaj Chetak scooter and rode off to Raja Electronics (that shop, by the way, is still around in 2024!) in Pan Dariba, Charbagh, in Lucknow. This was around 45 years ago and while I do remember going there and my father discussing things with the shop owner, I no longer remember any specific details that I can share with you. The bottomline is, we bought a Cosmic (a popular brand in the '70s) amplifier and a pair of matched speakers to go with it. Both were finished in dark, polished wood and brushed metal and to my eyes – I would have been about six or seven years old at the time – they were utterly beautiful. At home, the HMV record player was hooked up to the Cosmic amp and speakers, and our music listening experience immediately became so much better. While the mono speaker in the old HMV unit was passable, the stereo separation, clarity and power offered by the new Cosmic setup was in a different league altogether. Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons, for the next many months, were devoted to listening to my father’s LPs back-to-back, one after another. With me sitting next to him most of the time. We listened in silence, in quiet appreciation of our music. That old HMV record player and the Cosmic amp and speakers helped us – my father and I – forge a stronger bond over the music we loved so much.

As the years went by, our tastes in music diverged and took different paths. My father still loved his ghazals and remained attached to his vinyl records. I discovered music cassettes, which in turn opened up a whole new world of ‘English music’ to me. With the widespread availability of music cassettes (original as well as cheap pirated copies) in India in the 1980s, we got a National Panasonic cassette player and soon, our house was reverberating to the sounds of a whole new bunch of names. Names like ABBA, Boney M, Madonna, Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Debbie Gibson, Fancy, Kylie Minogue, Lionel Richie, Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, George Michael, Pet Shop Boys, Gloria Estefan, Paula Abdul, Gypsy Kings, Tina Charles, Modern Talking, Patsy Kensit and many, many others – all an indelible part of my growing up years in the 1980s. Cassettes were fairly easy to get – original ones weren’t very expensive and pirated copies were much cheaper. ‘Blank’ cassettes were also freely available and since some friends and I had double cassette players, which allowed copying tapes, we chipped in for each other, copying music and swapping tapes all the time. A lot of people say this about the music they listened to when they were young, and it’s no different for me – to this day, I still believe that the 1980s had some of the best music ever. The music, the melodies, the rhythm, the music arrangement – everything about it is simply incomparable.

All things must pass, and so it was with the 1980s, perhaps the best, most memorable decade of my life. Fortunately, 1990s music was not so bad either. Maybe not as good as the music from the ’80s, but still good nevertheless. And the other thing was, music CDs, which were launched in India in the late-1980s, became more widely available from the mid-1990s onwards, though they were still pretty expensive. Over the years, my father had gotten more and more busy at work and did not listen to music as often as he did earlier, but seeing my love for music, he did get me a powerful new Sony CD player, which could take three CDs at a time. Pressing the ‘eject’ button and seeing its revolving tray come out of the player ever so silently used to be a visceral experience. Loading it up with three CDs, playing those and experiencing the explosive power of those large Sony speakers – that was music like I’d never heard it before. It was just so much fun! The CDs were quite expensive though. I remember paying Rs 800 for Michael Jackson’s Bad and, I think, around Rs 400 (or maybe Rs 500 – I don’t remember the exact figure now) for a CD of the Titanic OST. That’s 1990s money, remember. Not easy for college kids, that’s for sure, though the difference in the quality of sound – when you compared a cassette being played on our long-serving Panasonic cassette player, vs. CDs played on the Sony system – was huge. I was running my own small business in Lucknow in the late-1990s and money was sometimes scarce – I had to choose between buying petrol for my bikes (a Yamaha RX100, followed by a Kawasaki KB125) or buying a new CD!

Soon enough, the winds of change were blowing again. Due to certain circumstances, I had to decide to close my business and moved from Lucknow to Bombay, where I joined CHIP magazine as a writer. That is a full story in itself and I’ll save that for another day. For now, let’s only focus on music. I could not take my Sony CD player to Bombay, where I spent my first two months in a small room in the Kanara Catholic Association (KCA) hostel and subsequently moved to a one-room paying-guest accommodation in Mahim. No place in either of these for a large, powerful stereo system. But remember, change is the only constant. CDs were gradually giving way to MP3s – often illegally ‘ripped’ from the very CDs they ended up replacing. These MP3s were easily available on the Internet and could be downloaded for free. CHIP was a technology magazine and things were pretty liberal at the workplace – you could play your favourite music at work as long as you wore a pair of headphones. And late in the evening, when most people had left the office and only a bunch of us young kids in their 20s – who had nothing better to do than while away their spare time in office – were left in the building, you could also play your music at high volume. Which wasn’t that high anyway, since the small ‘multimedia’ speakers attached to our PCs weren’t very powerful. The important thing was, the computer – the desktop PC – completely replaced my standalone CD player as the primary music playback device. No, the PC and its small speakers weren’t a patch on the sound quality, power and performance delivered by my standalone CD player, but I started working full-time and spent hours in front of a PC, the computer was just so much more practical, more convenient. It was just there whenever I wanted to listen to music and that is what mattered most. And as for the MP3, the sound quality suffers due to compression (necessary in order to keep the file sizes small) but a lot of people can’t tell the difference between a CD and an MP3, especially if the latter has been coded with the right settings. And for those who definitely want much better quality, there is always the FLAC format, which is also easily available on the Internet.

Today, in 2024, the very idea of buying any form of physical media – CDs, cassettes, LPs – seems archaic to me. I’ve been listening to digital formats – mainly MP3s and FLACs – for ages and the computer continues to be the centre of my musical universe. I never did take to streaming music and have never used Spotify or any other music streaming app. I guess I’m old fashioned in that sense – while I haven’t bought a cassette or a CD in decades, I still need to ‘own’ the music that I love and I want to play that music at any time and in any order I want, without any interruptions. Which, for me, means MP3s or FLACs that are stored on my PC, on its SSD, where I know my collection of songs is always accessible. For random listening, there’s always YouTube, where everything is available but where the advertisements can sometimes ruin the experience.

My love for music playback hardware, which kicked off with the Cosmic amplifier and speakers my father bought back in the late-1970s, has also grown over the years. Kids these days are happy to stream music from their phones via Bluetooth. I actually like mucking around with amps, connector cables, hi-fi speakers, EQ settings – putting in some effort and getting everything just right can be magical. But these days, I don’t go to actual, physical shops to browse through the latest stuff. Instead, I spend hours on Amazon looking at the latest, greatest speakers from brands like KEF, Sonos, JBL, Swans Mivi, Polk Audio, Bose, Yamaha, Marshall, Bang & Olufsen, Naim and some others. Until recently, I had a couple of Bose desktop speakers hooked up to my PC and for years, these provided adequate – if not outstanding – performance for regular, everyday listening. Earlier this month, after many years of faultless service, one of the Bose speakers was blown out and it was time to get a replacement. This time, I’ve got the Edifier R1700BT, a pair of bookshelf speakers that are sufficiently powerful for my requirements – clear vocals, clear mids and highs, and deep, thumping bass that I often find myself turning down. I’ll be 52 years old at the end of this year and my ears can no longer take the kind of high-volume music playback that I found so pleasurable 40 years ago.

I also find that with every passing year, it becomes harder for me to find new music that I can appreciate. I have a fairly large collection of my favourite music from the period mid-1970s to the early-2000s and more often than not, I find myself playing that music over and over again. Sure, I do find something new once in a while that I love, it’s just that it doesn’t happen very often. For the most part, I’m happy with the music from my growing up years. This also brings me to my dear father, with whom I started my music appreciation journey all those decades ago. At the end of this year, he’ll be 80 years old and remains fit and fully active. However, his earlier love for music seems to have diminished quite a bit. The old record players and cassette players are, of course, long gone. And since my father isn’t very tech-savvy and doesn’t use a PC or a laptop, MP3s or other digital formats are not really an option. These days, his music is restricted to an old, small JBL system that’s hooked up to a really old iPod Nano that’s filled with some music of his choice. Apart from that, he occasionally listens to some FM channels on the radio, and that’s about it. He says he’s more than happy with this arrangement and does not want a more advanced or a more complex setup.

Is the love for music – discovering new music all the time, listening to it, storing it, cataloguing it and coming back to it time and again – essentially a young person’s thing? I would certainly hope not! I’m no longer young now – not by any stretch of the imagination – and I still enjoy my music as much as I used to, two, three or even four decades ago. Sure, it’s old(er) music most of the time and the volume knob on my new pair of Edifiers doesn’t see a great deal of action, but I love my music all the same. Music is the one thing that has the power to easily stir up range of emotions in me – it can make me happy, make me sing along in joy, and it can move me to tears. Over the decades, through good times and bad, my music is the one thing that’s always stayed with me. And I hope to continue listening till the day I’m gone. Until then, don’t stop the music – just let it play. 

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