Why I Started Collecting CDs Again
The story behind my 90s rap CD collection
It began the year I was about to turn 40 — 2021. That winter our basement flooded, and my tall-as-me CD cabinet IKEA doesn’t make anymore was one of the casualities. Its stumpy, particle board legs were soaked and slowly bowing under the weight of the close to 1,000 CDs (and some tapes and DVDs) it stored. The cabinet had to go, along with so much of our other stuff, and now I was faced with another problem: What was I gonna do with all these CDs?
I hadn’t listened to an actual CD in years, not since the catalytic converter blew on my 2002 Nissan Sentra and used cars with Bluetooth finally came into my price range. Up until then, the last CD I bought was The Marshall Mathers LP 2, and it came out in 2013 on my 32nd birthday. I remember picking it up at Target in downtown Seattle that morning, running the 7 miles home, my longest run at the time, and listening to it with my boy Steve, kicking it like we were still in college bumping the first Marshall Mathers LP in his Honda Civic on the way to class. The sequel wouldn’t be as dope as the original, though “Rap God” might be the best rapping Eminem’s done since he stopped popping those blue and yellow purple pills, but my connection to MMLP2 wasn’t about the music — it was about my memory of it, that day, buying myself the CD for my birthday, running 7 miles (a personal record back then when I was pushing 250+ on the scale), and chillin’ with my best friend.
Looking at this cabinet full of CDs, all I saw were the memories. My first winter in Seattle when Kanye’s The College Dropout was the soundtrack of my commutes to a job I wanted to quit and buy me a spaceship and fly past the sky. (I really do miss the old Kanye….) The summer of 2005 Steve and I spent funemployed together with Donuts and Common’s Be on repeat while drinking Chuck Shaw and writing poetry until sunrise. The A I got on an essay comparing the ethics of vampires in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire with Chino XL’s “Ghetto Vampire” in my senior year of high school. The last half of 1998 when that first Noreaga album got put on max volume at every house party when somebody’s parents weren’t home.
Sure, there was some filler in my collection I wouldn’t bump even if I owned a CD player, mostly discs long-ago exes had given me because for some reason they thought I might like Limp Bizkit or Sisquo. I couldn’t just get rid of the CDs. Not all of them. But, for real, was I ever gonna bump a Gnarls Barkley album front to back again?
Around this same time, I also happened to be going through a midlife crisis, accelerated by the pandemic giving me too much time to think about my remaining days on this Earth. Guided by #noregrets, I’d gotten my first tattoo (up to four now); ran a half-marathon, which I’ll never do again (!); and wasted hours researching the tax hit I’d take if I cashed out the three 401Ks I had from old jobs and bought an Escalade. Thankfully, I didn’t make that mistake.
It was hard for me to accept that I was closer to death than birth. When faced with any kind of decision, I found myself wondering, “What if I die tomorrow?” I could only dodge the reality of my age for so long, and the CDs were a reminder of that. It seemed like just yesterday I was skipping school to wait on line at Sam Goody to be one of the first people to cop Wu-Tang Forever. Nope, that was almost 30 years ago. (Pour one out for Sam Goody ‘cause Goody got it.)
I could live without Gnarls Barkley, and I’d rather die than listen to Limp Bizkit, but what if I bit it tomorrow never bumping Mobb Deep’s The Infamous again? I still had the CD I got from the BMG Music Club. I had memberships in my name, my mother’s, and all of our cats, working that penny a CD deal hard. Music clubs were how I started collecting back in 1993 when I signed up for Columbia House and got Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle and Mariah Carey’s Music Box for a penny.
Lemme hit pause for a sec and address what you may be thinking: What about Spotify? Now I’m not an audiophile by any means, but if you happen to have The Infamous CD handy, click over to track 7, push the volume up, and let those drums hit you. Now try the same with Spotify — you’ll know what I’m saying. Don’t like Mobb Deep? Any CD you got lying around will do. I have mid-life hearing (mid-life hips and knees, too), and I can tell the difference. There are also some albums, 90s rap especially, that you can’t find on streaming in their original forms because of sample clearance issues, like Biggie’s Ready to Die or Ghostface Killah’s Ironman, and others you can’t find at all (The Beatnuts’ Stoned Crazy, DJ Premier’s New York Reality Check 101, De La Soul’s entire catalog up until recently, etc.).
So, I kept asking myself: What if I died tomorrow and never bumped the greatest rap album ever made, Illmatic, again? What if I died tomorrow and never shook my ass to “Fuck wit Dre Day” again? What if I died tomorrow and never heard the Method Man and Raekwon “torture” skit again? (IYDKNYK: Skits were major in 90s rap, and Wu-Tang had the best.)
As I played this mid-life crisis Russian Roullette sorting through my CD collection, it was the ones from the 90s that meant the most to me. These were the years when I grew up, during the golden age of hip hop and the peak of compact discs, back when what you listened to defined everything about you down to the patches on your Jansport. It was the music that took me back to my block, to Hot 97 and Yo! MTV Raps and Video Music Box, to whole summer breaks spent playing NBA Live with my boys arguing over who had the best double album, Biggie or 2Pac.
Those CDs were some of the only things I still had from my childhood. They made the trek with me all the way from my apartment in Queens to my dorm room in California and everywhere I lived after. I remembered listening to them on my silver Magnavox 3-CD changer that sat on my dresser in my bedroom, or on the Sony discman I got one Christmas and never left home without. All the weekends I spent digging, stalking the aisles of Towers, Sam Goodys, and HMVs; those rides on the J train to hit the record stores in South Jamaica or all the spots in the city, the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, Fat Beats above the Bagel Buffet; or just hoofing it to my local spot, Liberty Records, up on Liberty Ave.
None of those places even existed anymore, yet they felt alive in my mind. Each CD became a portal to a place and a time, another life, another self, a different world entirely. I couldn’t just throw those memories away — not all of them.
So, I decided to focus my collection. I sold every CD I owned that wasn’t 90s rap. Then, in true mid-life crisis fashion, I hunted down the CD player I always wanted when I was a kid, a Sony MegaStorage 200 CD changer. (Yes, you read that right: 200 CDs!) Bought it off some grandpa on Mercari in a Taco Time parking lot. Forget an Escalade. I was going full mid-life crisis… collecting CDs.
In the years since that flood, we’ve remodeled the basement, turning my tiny-ass writing office into a much-nicer-but-still tiny writing office / listening room where my collection lives, organized chronologically by release date on the collector’s choice for storage, IKEA’s Kallax shelves. (Nah, I’m not getting a kickback from IKEA… yet?) I have what I believe to be the best 199 albums of 90s rap loaded into the CD player, though it changes every few months, with one slot for playing the other discs in my collection. At this point, I’m close to 400 — and counting.
I listen to CDs everyday like it’s 1996. Whenever I press play, I have a story to tell, about the music, about me, about the world when the album dropped, or something else that a bar or a beat got me thinking of, and since I’m not getting any younger, I’ve been thinking maybe I should write some of them down. My collection is more than just some rap CDs. It’s an archive of a culture at its start, hip hop before Jack Harlow and Rap Snacks, in its last remaining physical form, and like Nas raps on Illmatic, “I’d like to take a trip down memory lane.”