So, let me put on my Internet Old Person hat and tell you kids about the the way we committed music piracy in the long long ago of 2001, and the fragility of those music collections in those days.
You might know Napster. You might know Limewire. But there was a music piracy tool in between those. A little remembered program called AudioGalaxy, and it worked a little like Napster and a little like BitTorrent. The exact details of how it worked are immaterial, but one thing it did was when you searched for an artist, the songs were sorted, in essence, by popularity (e.g. how many people had that specific song file shared.)
Now, I can’t understand why this was a thing, but there was a strange phenomenon in the early days of file sharing and music piracy where people would share songs with the wrong artist name or song title. Certain bands and artists got a lot of stuff attributed to them that they never recorded. “Weird” Al Yankovic may be the most infamous victim of this, with nearly every novelty song and song parody released attributed to him regardless of quality or subject matter.
The confluence of these two phenomena are how I discovered one of my favorite bands of all time.
So, in my late teens, I found a new favorite band. A quickly little one-hit wonder known as DEVO. Y’know, the band that dd “Whip It.” They had the funny red hats that looked like flowerpots. Those guys.
Anyway, I had become obsessed with this band to the point of autistic hyperfixation, and I wanted to hear everything they’d ever put out. At that point, they’d released nine studio albums, a couple live albums, and two collections of early demos, and I wanted them all. So I would find myself crawling in the bottom pages of the AudioGalaxy search results looking for those obscure tracks—b-sides, songs on soundtracks and compilations, the occasional bootleg, They’d pop up between songs that were obviously not by DEVO, and much like our poor friend Alfred Yankovic, any sort of vaguely quirky 80s song got assigned to DEVO.
That was how I found it. A song called, simply, “Detachable Penis.”
Now, I had never heard of such as song, but I knew on the face of it, it wasn’t a DEVO song.
But with a title like that, I knew I had to find out just what in the name of fuck a song called “Detachable Penis” sounded like.
It sounded, dear reader, like this:
(CWs: blurry images of a dildo, the word penis, spoken word poetry)
And I immediately went to Google, because this song somehow tickled an itch in my brain, and I had to go and find out the real band that recorded this song, because how the hell else was I going to get every song I could of theirs I could get my grubby little hands on. The band was called King Missile, and I was hooked.
I’d like to see any music discovery algorithm beat that.
I eventually acquired their entire major discography along with a few EPs and B-Sides. I eventually burned those to a CD, which I could listen to with my MP3 CD Player.
And I realize, upon writing that, for you youth “MP3 CD Player” is a noun phrase that needs explaining. See, while the iPod had been released at that point, and similar devices were also on the market, they were all prohibitively expensive. The economical way to listen to pirated music files was to burn them to CD, but some CD players had software that allows you to burn those song as as data. Suddenly, you could have a single CD with 700 megabytes of MP3 files—room for an artist’s entire discography, if not multiple artists.
Since I was download a whole lot of MP3s with my high speed DSL connection, I was taking up an awful lot of space on my hard drive that needed to be offloaded somehow. CD-Rs and an MP3 CD Player were the optimal solution. And it worked…
…until it didn’t.
In the summer of 2002, my parents took me on a vacation to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It was in the latter city where someone got into our rental car and swiped my MP3 CD player and a binder of CDs—both pressed CDs I’d acquired and CD-Rs of illicitly acquired MP3s, along them a CD-R I’d burned containing the nearly complete King Missile discography.
Songs I had only on that one CD-R.
It took me a decade—ten fucking years—before I’d recovered all the music that was on that disc.
This is the sort of discovery and the sort of loss that kids will never experience again in this day of Spotify and the all-you-can-eat buffet of music on demand we have now.