A House of Bootlegs

When I think of my childhood home, I don’t think of sleepovers with friends or my mum’s home cooking. I don’t think of the pictures on the wall, the garden I played in, or even my own bedroom. The place I grew up in is, first and foremost, in my memories, a wall of CDs.

We lived in a house of bootlegs. My dad owned more Bruce Springsteen live shows than most people owned records at all, and it wasn’t only his collection we lived alongside (though it was the most significant). Some of my earliest memories are of the gray-white tray under the seat in the car that was full of cassette tapes; one of the most important things that happened in our family was getting a six-CD changer when we upgraded to the Ford Focus. Peppered in amongst my dad’s tastes were my mum’s, which leaned more pop and more vintage – 30s jazz, Motown, The Beatles – and some odd choices we inherited from my aunt’s move to America, though they were mainly vinyl records. I remember sitting on the floor of my parents’ bedroom as my dad fished out a Joni Mitchell 12″ to show me her album artwork properly, I remember the harmonies I sang with my mother in the car. I remember the odd few boxed sets, which were removed from the proper boxes to find their home in the alphabetised collection whilst the cases were displayed on the top. I remember being surprised to find other people didn’t alphabetise their CDs, and surprised again when I found out they didn’t need to because they only owned five or six or fifteen – less than me as a young, young child, even before I started spending my lunch money on music. I always had a music shelf of my own: Madonna and Elvis best ofs, a taped copy of No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, the Goldfrapp debut my dad assured me I wouldn’t like but that got played to death in my chunky, 3-foot hi-fi system with a tape deck and a CD player and a radio and space for two microphones, in case I wanted to sing, amplified, with friends. Later I got a little CD alarm clock, with a blue LED light, and Franz Ferdinand albums. Endless 2-for-£10 HMV CDs. CD singles from the local record shop. And, of course, an iPod – upon which I put the music from my CDs, each painstakingly uploaded with my own write-over of certain metadata categories. Always, always we had music – and our own music, not the radio. Radios are for cars, or perhaps the kitchen, with their irritating, self-important DJs and same-old playlisted tracks. Collections where for people who wanted to listen to music, who wanted to explore music, who wanted to know music, its history and key figures and its cool underground and its influences. Collections were my parents’ knowledge and joy, not the lowest common denominator.

A house of bootlegs is a powerful thing. I would shut myself away in my room with music, and I would try things from my parents’ record collection to educate myself, whether it was my mum’s Kate Bush or my dad’s Dylan. I wouldn’t listen to just the one that caught my eye but the whole discography, expanding outwards from a compilation to a lifetime of making music. I learned to read everything from names to fonts to understand even before spinning a disc what an artist intends, who they are, and how I might relate to them. I learned to become literate in music, even if I can’t play or sing. I became literate in references and fan culture, and all without the internet.

Growing up in my parents’ music was open to me, a millennial, in a way I don’t think it was open to any generation before or since. The cost of building a music library being attainable to the middle classes, the gestation of the internet that allowed my father to buy Japanese import CDs by Matthew Sweet, and the tech boom that allowed me to listen alone if I wished but wasn’t yet capable of allowing me to eschew my parents’ library entirely all combined to create a music education I would envy had it not been my own. I had access to deep cuts, to that which my parents loved and hated and were indifferent to, could easily waste my time browsing the shelves of a record shop (such a thing still existing) before heading back home and trying something new. We didn’t yet have Shazam or Siri to tell us what songs where, but a Google search for lyrics is (perhaps surprisingly to the younger generation) just as effective. I don’t think I ever much contributed to the charts, except the album charts (the only one that really matters: fans listen to albums, casuals listen to singles), and when I very rarely got iTunes vouchers I spent them on things I didn’t really want, because anything I did want I’d get the CD. That’s not to say MP3s were not valuable to me: I remember St Vincent being on iTunes ‘single of the week’, and other people I still listen to. I still digitally hoard hundreds upon hundreds of unreleased tracks, rare b-sides, and live covers by artists I love. This, too, was in the spirit of the house of bootlegs: music can be researched, and your collection can aim to contain multitudes. Although I by and large listen to music digitally now, I use playlists to categorise and compile an artist’s work: I can arrange chronologically, I can include album artwork from singles or deep cuts, I can browse and listen uninterrupted by an algorithm, all of which I learned to appreciate in my house of bootlegs.

It’s probably a pain to live with my taste in music. My playlists which are all over a day long, my buying of new CD variants for the bonus tracks, my inability to let anybody else take the aux or, heaven forbid, leave it be. It’s irritating and expensive to have to re-order my playlists any time a new single drops and spend hours of my life hunting down comprehensive lists of which unreleased tracks have leaked. One day I’ll surely be sat in a mausoleum of music, but with a wall like the one I grew up with I’ll be able to browse and know that, whatever I alight upon, it belongs to me – not in the sense of possession, but in the capital-S Sensible way, that it belongs to my heart and my memory and my self-conception. A house of bootlegs is made to be enjoyed, but it is curated for the tastes of one person – I don’t know if I can call such a thing a contribution to the world. But drop the links to your GDrive with unreleased songs in the comments all the same.

On This Topic:

• I’m all about sharing knowledge, so here’s a mess of a continually-growing playlist of artists and songwriters I can hear in Taylor Swift’s music or who I think Swifties would like. Go forth and ideate!
• I have a lot of books on my TBR about the music industry specifically, and though I haven’t yet got around to reading them perhaps others might? Spotify, Record Stores, and Nashville all feature.
• Almost Famous, the by-fans-for-fans film about obsession. I haven’t read High Fidelity so I can’t speak to it and am not a huge fan of Kevin Smith so would rather not speak on Clerks.

To-Do:

• Email Library peeps RE: meeting (past tense)
• Email other library peeps RE: meeting (future tense)
• Contact Book Group, and probably other friends too.

Today’s Culture:

• Contemplating buying £30 paper from Japan. All I hear is ‘tomoe river, tomoe river‘ and now I need to try it.
• Cherry Diet Dr Pepper better not stay limited edition cause it’s delicious. I mean, it tastes the same as dandelion & burdock, but I love that shit so I would like it to stick around.
• Lisa Eldridge lipsticks: I have the colour ‘velvet pompadour’ from the Selfridges x Barbie Movie popup and it moisturises, doesn’t feather, and lasts a long time. I might have to buy more colours, dang it, and the general consensus is I should stop wearing corals so I don’t even know where to go.