Saturday, February 26, 2005

"Sam the Record Man" is my friend once again

Ah, I am reminded of the olden days, yes, the Great Cassette Sale of 2001 which might have marked the last time I purchased something at Sam's (it makes for a better story if we assume this to be true). This time, the clearance racks were stacked with loonie discs, and I made away with a twelve-strong booty of $1 CD's (plus a few for $5.99 -- hey, six bucks for Beltram on Tresor, a Playhouse comp, and the Scala album I've been trying to track down for ages ? I'll take it. Ooooh, and 20% off the Mojo "Depeche Mode and the Story of Electro-pop" issue!).

You can't go wrong with a $1 CD. There is no CD on this earth that isn't worth one measley dollar. Either you get some music you enjoy (and it only takes one or two great tracks to make up that dollar's worth*. The runaway success of iTunes has certainly taught us that) or you get to laugh your ass off at crap and write a scathing review of it. In fact, I've used that writer's justification on several occasions. Good music or bad, what I was really purchasing was an object I could write about. I was purchasing my own writing (wait, when I put it that way, it's sort of pathetic).

* all of this reasoning only holds true in the small sample limit. Buying five hundred randomly chosen CD's for five hundred dollars is not worth it. You can't laugh off five hundred crappy CD's. Remember that case in San Francisco in the 70's, where a guy ate about 450 Twinkies and then shot some people? The preservative inside the Twinkie wrapper is harmless if you only have a few, but the accumulation of it after eating hundreds of Twinkies at one sitting has psychotic side effects. That's what one dollar CD's are like.

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