Disc rot, brain rot

I thought there’d be no better way to celebrate Miles Davis’s centennial than to listen to his whole discography in chronological order (more on that later). Little did i know it’d change the way i see music. And it has nothing to do with Miles Davis himself.

You see, i still have a sizeable CD collection, including a few editions of Kind of Blue. What i didn’t know is that most – if not all – of them suffer from some sort of degradation. One disc from the early ’90s has turned a deep brown and can’t be read by any of my players. A few exhibit a bit of pitting, but it’s difficult to judge whether it’s an inconsequential manufacturing defect or the first signs of disc rot. Worse, a lot of recent releases are slowly but surely delaminating.

Compact discs were supposed to be more durable than vinyl records. Admittedly, some of my LPs sound really bad, but none of them are outright unplayable. Compact discs are sometimes advertised as the antidote for streaming. They might be less impermanent – and i’ve yet to see an AI-generated CD – but they’re not eternal. I can’t even find solace in the fact that i ripped all of my discs, because bit rot is a thing. In that weird and twisted way, bits are bits are bits, and they’ll all dissolve into the ether.

By coincidence, i realized that my most recent edition of Kind of Blue was delaminating a few hours before going to see the We Want Miles! project in concert. It was… fine? I found Mike Stern to be overbearing, Russell Gunn to be so subdued that he left the stage for minutes at a time, and, most surprising of all, Marcus Miller to be a bit sedate. Bill Evans was absolutely incredible, Mino Cinelu and Anwar Marshall formed an explosive duo on percussion, and it’s a crime that Brett Williams was underused, because he’s a damn groovy keyboard player.

Trouble is, after sleeping on it for too short a night, i wonder if i wasn’t too harsh in my initial assessment. Was i a bit tired because by the time Marcus Miller entered the stage, we’d been baking in a blazing sun for hours? Was i in a foul mood because the drunkards around us were “talking” so loudly that it was sometimes difficult to actually hear the band? Maybe. That’s the thing about live music: the music is only part of the experience, and it might not be the most important one.

But then, a far more insidious form of rot is going to take place: brain rot. No, not that one, the other one. What will i remember in a few days? In a few weeks? In a few years? Not the music, that’s for sure, nor the heat and the people. Maybe the only thing that i’ll remember is that i was there, listening to the band that brought Miles Davis out of retirement, and that the son of the most influential jazz saxophone player and a tremendous jazz harpist opened for them.

Memory is a fickle thing, even more so than a CD, and there’s no ripping it before it goes. Disc, rip, memory: everything i trusted to hold the music is failing, one format at a time. There was music; now there’s none. I was there; soon i’ll be gone.

BK