The 00's And Beyond.
Community college. Nothing but one bad misfortune after another since the first day I stepped foot on campus. I couldn’t go to university and instead fell into the trap of what they called “13th Grade”. They weren’t kidding. I endured and unwilling tolerated rejection, targeting, exclusion, and betrayal - both during and in-between semesters. All the drama I dealt with in my senior year continued on-campus. It multiplied two-fold and never let up; from the first week until the last.
The last day of the my final semester there came and went. No fond farewell, no reminiscing, no saying good-bye or keeping in touch with anyone. I just wanted out. What a fucking disaster that was. It’s done, it’s over. Thank fucking God. Good riddance and get lost. The un-ceremonial, disappointing first year of the new millennium is almost over.
We’re now a year removed from the new number change. It’s one week until Christmas. Somehow, a switch was flipped. Good fortunes started to happen the instant I left community campus behind. Something influential would be arriving at our house. I already had one major life-changing experience earlier that year. Now, I’d have another. One heavy component would change the course of my timeline forever.
My dad came home from Uncle Elvis’ house in Staten Island. He had a few boxes he needed help unloaded from his car. My dad and I lugged everything through our front door and into our makeshift office.
What’s this? Elvis donated a desktop tower to my ma’ & dad. A heavy Dell Dimension PC running Windows 98 with a Pentium II processor, 32MB of RAM, and upgraded to a whopping 1GB of hard drive space. No one told me we were getting all this for free. Why is he giving this to us? Was he upgrading, or did he snatch it from the curb? Who cares?! We got a free computer rig. Don’t ask any more questions.
It couldn’t come at a better time because I didn’t have to drive to the computer labs anymore, or wait to visit my family in Staten Island to use theirs. Now, I could stream grainy low-resolution videos and wait 15 minutes to load up 30-second MP3 samples right at home. But, I soon discovered the real reason why we inherited Uncle Elvis’ computer: my dad learned about a “website” where we could download free music.
We heaved everything onto the fragile wooden computer in the newly-christened home office. The PC, VGA monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, modem, and the printer, too. I was the internet tech of the house, so they left it up to me to set it up for them. I made sure everything was connected and plugged in, and then I hit the power button. Windows 98 greeted us with a dreamy sound; signaling that from now on Microsoft now owns all of our lives.
It took only a few moments for me to install Napster, set up the file destinations, and get it all running. Ma’ & dad pulled up their office folding chairs and sat in front of that computer. Within two hours they were off and running. They downloaded their favorite country hits and Sixties soul. Ma’ found her golden oldies of the Fifties. Dad got his classic coke-rock. This was maybe the only time in their marriage that they were inseparable. My bro- would unceremoniously kick us all off without apology to make his own thug rap compilations made of 2Pac, DMX, and Capone & N.O.R.E.
I heard all about these rarities, B-sides, unreleased tracks, and format exclusives through word of mouth and the internet; all stuff I knew wouldn’t find in record stores. I was (and still am) a completionist. These songs were never meant to be heard, and it felt like a sin listening to them. I also remembered many songs I heard on the radio, but the artist and title were lost on me. Either the dee-jays didn’t announce them on-air, or I missed out on hitting the ‘record’ button.
Finally, it’s my turn. Remember that scene in “Bully For Bugs” when Toro The Bull had that sinister grin on his face when he realized at that moment he could shoot bullets through his horns with his rifle tail?
In a matter of minutes, rare Autechre compilation tracks were in my hands. I found some Alec Empire and Aphex Twin EPs I never knew existed. Underworld B-sides, exclusives, and rare remixes were there for the taking. All of it. From that moment on I was playing in a territory without borders; limited only by what was uploaded and shared by users around the world and not by money or music-store prices anymore. No longer did I have to spend $20.00 for a CD just to have one song that wasn’t sold as a single, or consider paying stroke-inducing import or secondhand prices. Play before you pay. Pass ‘GO’ and collect $200.00.
I dodged the hottest unreleased viruses in the streets featuring Jay-Z, Ja Rule, Jada Kiss, Fat Joe, Big Pun, French Montana, Sheek Louch, Styles P, Rah Digga, Eminem, Method Man, Foxy Brown, L’il Kim, and more. Where did I end up instead? Pimp Daddy Welfare’s “Elmo Pimps Hoes”; one of the first “stars” of the “internet era” as we knew it. A far-away, distant second only to Afroman, because we all know how he turned out.
I’d also come across and avoided many unknown nobodies promoting their up-and-coming “careers” all throughout these MP3 sites. “$$$Hot shit from the underground!$$$ My name i$ [something you’d forget in five seconds] and I beg all of you listen to ***THE GREATE$T*** rap $ong you ever heard in your life! Take a li$ten and get the word out!”. Sit the fuck down, Elroy. No one cares.
Sometimes, I didn’t get what I wanted. I double-clicked The White Stripes and received mislabeled, tired, factory garbage such as Britney Spears, N*Sync, or Limp Bizkit instead. I‘d hastily jump from receiving MP3’s, skip quality control, and go directly to burning; only for the final product to have various inconsistencies too late to correct. I’d burn a quiet song, say, Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” and I’d hear the obvious hiccups, clipping, and snips cut all throughout the song. Whoops.
My family later discovered that our Dell tower had a built-in CD drive. We can burn discs and make music discs, too! We were always prepared with a full 50-count spindle of Memorex CD-R’s by our side, a few loose Verbatim blanks, and some white paper sleeves for this purpose. Ma’ & dad spent even more hours of their waking day burning whole albums to take with them on long drives. It was a good thing that most players were CD-R compatible in exchange for not having any saving grace of skip-protection when you hit a bump or pothole, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t hear The Rolling Stones “Harlem Shuffle”, Dire Straits’ “Walk Of Life”, or James Taylor’s “Steamroller” on the way back home.
Burning became second-nature to me. I made it a practice of saving everything I could because I hate losing anything forever. Nero and Roxio had a function to burn MP3’s as data. 750MB on CD, and 4.3GB on DVD. I had to do it as the Dell family PC had only 1GB of storage (100-150 songs). Imagine that: a disk holding anywhere from 75%-80% to four times as much of what a 1GB hard-drive did. Sooner or later, we replaced our PC with a larger drive capacity. More than generous for me to permanently move up to DVDs from that point on. Everything I downloaded I’d have forever. I wouldn’t realize until later on what impact archiving would have on me and for the many projects I would do.
Our PCs had minuscule amounts of RAM that any program, chat window, or pop-up killed the Nero session. Many a blank Maxell, Memorex, or Verbatim CD-R were tossed and deemed unusable as it only allowed you to write once without a do-over. My cheating ex- was a major culprit of that. She wasn’t happy with the damage she’d done to me. She wanted more. She stalked me by recreating new AOL accounts. Every time I blocked her, she would return with a new username. Our PC fucked itself because it couldn’t handle everything at once. Many a blank disc became a casualty because of her, and I had to quit chats altogether to have her stop. The rate of error and ejection became so low overtime that I wouldn’t need to use any re-writables (CD-RW).
As one downloading site was taken down, another went live. I branched out to Audiogalaxy right after Napster’s original demise before ma’ & dad decided it was a great idea to fuck ourselves with Kazaa. When Audiogalaxy shut down, I moved to WinMX before we uninstalled Kazaa and used SLSK ever since. (Limewire or Bearshare never ever crossed our minds.)
And so it went on. My family & I would have these downloading and burning marathons day-in, day-out. We’ve listened to thousands of songs, deleted thousands more, burned hundreds of discs, and went through three PCs for the love of the game; up until our very last day at our old house. Ma’ & dad’ decided one Summer that they were selling the house and moving out-of-state. My life was in a state of temporary turmoil balancing 40-hour work weeks, attending university, and finding new housing.
Thanksgiving came and it was written. I decided to stay here on Long Island while ma’ & dad migrated to South Carolina - and they took the family PC with them.
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Shaun Fanning literally created his own Pandora’s Box / Game Of Life scenario he could never take back. Within a few months, his creation caused panic in the music industry. It was easier, quicker, and more convenient to download whatever you could think of. Many people stopped paying full price on a CD for only one song, or would no longer pay for any albums or music, period. If people could save money, they will. Or, “fuck the labels, fuck the music industry”. In fact, even we didn’t need to say it. Prince gave away free copies of Musicology during his tours, and Planet Earth through UK tabloids. He literally fucked over all the label suits and execs-. Even Public Enemy’s Chuck D said free music would be the future. Not according to Lar$ Ul-rich, who openly mocked Napster on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Well, we all know how that game ended for him.
The major labels poorly done damage control in the worst way. Instead of embracing the downloading metagame, they fought against it via lawsuits and many threats of litigation. It took years of industry restructuring for them to lick their wounds - cut through lightning-fast duplication and diminishing returns - to keep themselves alive. Instead, they further fucked themselves. Not since Columbia House’s music mail-order (“Eight CDs For A Penny!”) did music fans take the major labels for a ride, opened the passenger door, and kicked them to the curb. My ma’ & dad did. Many times!
When Napster arrived, there was absolutely no turning back. Zero. Nothing would be repairable ever again. That era would pave the way for almost everything I’d become and every project I do. The advent of music sites compounded with easy access and high-speeds to anything I can think of equaled an unparalleled, exponential rate of music discovery and knowledge. I was obsessed with music by the time the turn of the millennium hit. I was already in tune to hip-hop, alternative, hardcore, industrial, and all things electronic after I exited high-school. My desire for discovering artists and sounds would become exponentially larger. Year over year.
Before we all discovered downloading, there was one other positive life-changing moment I mentioned before that happened prior to this. I dealt with quitting jobs, ending friendships, and having trips canceled. The final Summer during community college died before the 4th of July. After all of that, it was single-handedly salvaged and validated by one single event. That was turning the FM dial at the right time.
It was a Sunday-to-Monday overnight when, other than naturally turning the frequency, that I discovered to something magical; something I never heard before. Lonnie Liston Smith, Les McCann, and a sampling medley played by WUSB’ship-hop and rap dee-jays. I was stunned! Those sounds hit me like no other. They perfectly matched and described my Brooklyn childhood. That precise moment was when those doors opened before me, and welcomed me to a ‘new’ world that no longer existed.
I was now one of many who joined in on the hunt for hip-hop and rap samples. They followed where soul, funk, R&B and jazz went. The-breaks.com was one of the first sites where rap fans migrated to find who sampled what. I’m sure that and downloading online mixtapes from hiphopsite.com (dead for 11 years and counting) has turned many people in vinyl collectors; way before the new resurgence happened. I’m no exception. It’s why I have three full shelves of them.
Downloading has saved us lots of money in what we call ‘gems’. Those are records you’ll almost never see out in the wild. Samplists, spotters, and crate-diggers all know how rare or unattainable some of them are, and we discover them right after producers and hip-hop artists do. General Lee & The Space Army Band’s “We Did It, Baby”, Walt Barr’s East Winds, Rubba’s “Way Star”. Tomorrow’s People’s Open Soul (the black beauty version). You’d have to spend anywhere from $150.00-$1,500.00 to take an original or only pressing home with you, and that’s only if they’re not re-issued. Downloading canceled all of that out. You’d get a flat MP3 and not have a real physical artifact in your hands, and that answered the question of whether you’d pay the rent or have groceries for the week.
I became a new listener because of WUSB’s hip-hop and sampling roster. There came a few months in-between leaving my last Summer job and my next where I had all the time in the world to kill. Countless Winter and Spring overnights in the home office were spent downloading and burning while also hitting ‘record’ on blank cassettes of whatever played through that frequency. This was when I started diving into many genres: soul, R&B, jazz, indie, IDM, noise rock, electronic, aggrotech, emo, punk, and riot grrrl. How many people do you know specialize or religiously listen to all of these genres at the same time? You’d agree we’re all psychotic.
Walkmans or Discmans were prominent during downloading’s genesis. I had both with me during family rides to Brooklyn and Staten Island. It all changed when Apple did something the MPMan, Lyra, and Diamond Rio couldn’t. They perfected and popularized the digital format’s profile with the high-capacity Apple iPod, and their monetized downloads through their iTunes store. Unbelievable. They took it back to the music industry and themselves in creating profits from the new format. I was sold the moment I learned that I could load up thousands of songs with no restrictions in copyright, DRM, or format.
A “friend” from the radio station who worked at Apple heard of my interest of getting one, and helped me grab it. I chose the iPod Classic 30GB for its larger capacity. (I cheaped out in not getting the 80GB and under-estimated my storage option as I’d later learn. Should’ve known better.) I held my very first Apple device in my hands. “Welcome to the cult”, they all say. White with a chrome’d stainless steel finish (engraved!) with a flat clickwheel, power switch, LCD screen, and a 30-pin connector. Also in the box were a couple of Apple stickers, earpods, and a felt sleeve. I’ll never forget it.
Those DVD-R archives I mentioned before? They’d become useful. I ripped songs off of them onto my desktop, dropped them in iTunes, and went straight into my iPod. I couldn’t wait to try it out. It just so happened that I’d be taking the Brentwood line to Penn Station tomorrow; as I’d be meeting up with a potential to go to the Brooklyn Museum Of Art.
I wait on the platform for the train to pull up. I board and sat backwards on the right-hand side. Let’s test it out. First song up: Boards Of Canada’s “Alpha & Omega”. Not a single pop, cut, skip, or snap of static. Everything sounded crystal clear through its painfully-fitted earphones. Next song up: Vincent Gallo’s “Apple Girl”; fitting for the person I’d be seeing in minutes. All went well without a hitch. The days of clumsiness and lugging a whole backpack of tapes and CDs with me were declared over. I retired my Walkman and Discman immediately.
My 30GB Classic became one of the most essential devices I could ever have. It came with me everywhere; carrying me through many of those rides so I could hear tons of songs and artists worthy of on-air time. It took me nine quick months before I filled up all 30GB of it. There was nothing I could’ve done about it because the current desktop was still at my family’s in South Carolina, and I knew it was about the quality.
One funny thing about troubleshooting MP3s is that you don’t have to splice and scotch together cassette tape. I treated myself to a Gateway laptop (15”/AMD Vision/4GB/500GB) to usher in the new decade. (Laptops had built-in CD trays back then.) I learned a multitude of iTunes’ intricacies and how to unlock my iPod to extract my MP3s. I read about file types (MP3, AAC, FLAC), bitrates (‘kbps’) and converted every song stored to 128GB, reloaded them, and seen the difference it made; numerically and quality-wise. I consolidated my storage and got two more years out of my first iPod before upgrading to the 160GB Classic. Now that was taken care off, downloading was off to the races once again.
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We’re in the right here, right now. I can say that downloading has influenced me like nothing else has. My obsession with music has intensified exponentially to juggernaut proportions because of it, and it’s only continues to get bigger. To this day, it’s my ultimate companion for everything I do music- and broadcast-related.
I was away from the radio station for four-and-a-half years due to unrelated personal issues. Yet, I always made a point to keep up with whatever sounds, artists, and albums were released. It’s only natural. I stayed in touch with indie, noise, shoegaze, punk, d-beat, breakbeat, jungle, and anything else you could think of (except classical, polka, or 3rd-wave ska). This was only the beginning.
How was all that possible? It cost me nothing to follow a near infinite multitude of music sites across themselves and social media. Inclination just put out a new album? There’s Straight Edge Worldwide for that. New artists such as Rips, Fib, and Stuck I never heard of? Thank you, Post Trash. Other outlets like No Echo, New Noise, Raven Sings The Blues, Alt-Citizen, D.I.Y., Rock The Bells, and others too many to think of carry me through and keep up with everything going on in the world. By that time, most music sites posted YouTube, Bandcamp, or Soundcloud links to promote artists’ music. With that comes many tools to rip music from whatever source I frequented. I backed-up all that I liked, and held onto everything just in case, because...
I enjoyed the airwaves so much that I wanted to return to the station and play everything that I liked during my absence. I felt like I wanted to get it all out there. My life was seeing an upturn, and I was excited that I was being myself again. The backlogs of all the downloads I kept up with made my return finally possible. I had so much across everything that I had to make a system for my current radio show Omega: deluxe home-slot shows for new, current, and favorite artists; and bonus fill-in slots for other musics I liked that don’t fit in deluxe mode. Bandcamp came into play during my early years of Omega, and further pried the door open to endless amounts of new sounds and genres in noise rock, post-punk, and d.i.y. It’s been necessary. There’s no limit on what you can find or discover.
Downloading is essential for any dee-jay. I had to have SLSK to keep up with my vicious thirst for music. I needed a good reach and a heavy amount of a music backlog to keep my show going. I feature(d) 20-25 different genres because downloading made everything available to me, and credit it for me staying on-the-air.
Those downloads and archives also came in handy not just for my radio show. I’ve already been on his hellsite for a couple of years, so why not establish a music blog? Ω+ was born, and just like Omega before it, I wanted to get all of my favorite finds and experiences out in the open. What do I thank for that? Once again, the steady stream of downloads and music outlets made that all possible.
Even ‘auditioning’ and listening to music on-the-go very much continues. It’s the ‘how’ that’s changed. My (last iPod) Classic 160GB filled to capacity. I officially had more downloads than what it could store, and I had to have something bigger. Now I had a much larger backup in the iPad Pro 10.5” 512GB. I had enough storage to back up my iPod three times over and then some (which I didn’t do). It made my life easier in not only sorting my music, but most importantly making my personal playlists, seasonal mixtapes, and Omega tracklists. It literally helped me make thousands of Ω+ posts.
But, I wasn’t going to bring my super-expensive iPad Pro everywhere with me on the train or in the car. No! The same year I acquired my first-ever tablet was when I upgraded to my very first iPhone (SE). Just like my first iPod Classic before it, my iPhone was symbolic on many trains rides to and from New York City. There’s more. I remember my SE became my closest companion to many back-and-forth walks to my neighborhood veteran’s park. It’s where those aforementioned post-punk and d.i.y. finds accompanied me and made many unforgettable Spring, Summer, and Autumn twilight days. The feels were that good.
Even my own mutuals who I follow here also left behind music (via YouTube, Bandcamp, or Spotify) which I come across all the time. I get them from my favorite mutuals from The Ukraine, Chicago, Panama, Los Angeles, The Poconos, West Michigan, Cleveland, and everywhere else they may be. From synthwave, electronic, black metal, punk, goth rock, indie, and just about damn everything. They’ve been so good to me that I trust them with their music taste, and I always rely on them to find something new. It never fails; each and every time.
Did I ever mention my record-store victory tours? What? You don’t know what a record-store victory tours even is? How dare you not know, you unwashed heathen. But, I’ll be nice and oblige. They’re what I call music shopping sprees. Downloading made me a fan of many more artists old and new, and preempts me to snatch tons more I wanted immediately without a second thought. Which explains why I have close to about 3,700+ separate releases across all formats. Or, is that my compulsivity?
So where are we now? To this day, I still use SLSK. Can you believe it’s still standing? How do they do it? Who cares?! They still exist and is here to stay. It’s been the backbone for me keeping up with everything I’ve done music-wise these days. I still use burner drives and DVD-Rs, too. I do everything whilst staying up until five in the morning. Amazing, right? Am I still recording FM radio on cassette? No. You can’t win them all.
Omega has been on the air for almost 14 full years with no signs of quitting. The original Ω+ site has been retired after 10 years, but continues on as the simpler, quicker ΩRMX. I have never skipped a seasonal playlist since starting All Things Omega, and my music quotient has gone up again since fighting my latest deep depression. My passion for playlists, mixtapes, and music in general to post hasn’t died with it, thank the Lord.
I am still obsessed with music to this way. At times, it accumulates so fast and heavy that I can’t keep up; even at speed-king or -demon rates. That never stopped. It makes me buckle in anxiety just thinking about the multi-thousand songs and hundreds of albums that are still piling up and need to sift through. That’s my next project: cutting it all down to zero. Cheers.
