Now of course this is practically a prerequisite for excellence when it comes to labels: near-total anonymity, I mean. Who, after all, even thinks about labels at all? Just obscurantists like ourselves: persons who make philatelists and ham radio operators look like average Joes with normal lives and healthy concerns. Let us face the facts, my friends. We are worse than those people who’ve got files of pornography jpegged and grouped into folders that they further subdivide by year, ethnicity, and relative degree of perversity. At least those people have some eventual goal in mind. We are worse: we turn a single CD over and over in our hands, picking its details apart with our eyes, scrutinizing the design for keys to the governing conceit, spending whole evenings listening to, say, five CDs on the same label, arranging them in the changer from earliest release date to most recent, trying to locate a narrative arc of some kind. Collectors of old arcade games might someday get asked to talk on Tech TV about MAME or something. We are worse: the older we get, the more convinced we become that our ability to hold forth on the subject of Sarah or Blanco y Negro will someday be of use, even though the weight of the evidence against such a proposition has grown difficult to ignore. We are worse: we don’t really actually care if what we’re doing turns out to be of no use at all, because when we indulge in our little habit, it makes us feel really good. |
