Aural Tradition

Last week, I lost my entire music collection when the hard drive on which it is stored suddenly disappeared from my computer. Actually, "disappeared" isn't quite the word I'm looking for, since it's safe to assume the drive was still bolted onto the inside of the chassis. But since it was now invisible to the computer, for all practical purposes, the hard drive was gone, and along with it, my entire music collection.

That's 15,000 songs, by the way. Forty-two days of consecutive music without a repeat. Nearly eighty gigabytes of data. Gone.

And it's not the first time it's happened. The first time was only two weeks after I decided to do away with my CDs in the first place. I was moving from Los Angeles (to parts unknown) and didn't want all those pesky pieces of plastic weighing me down. I spent a few days committing hundreds of CDs to a hard drive, put the CDs in a box, and shipped them to my parents' house for storage.

I sent the box regular mail, uninsured, and it never arrived.

What can I say? Insurance is legalized gambling and I lost.

A few days later, the hard drive on which I'd copied the music made some ugly chunking sounds, spat out some actual smoke, and before I knew it, I'd managed to lose the same music collection twice in a single week.

Call it a Buddhist lesson in detachment.

[I did manage to recover a few songs from that hard drive, though a lot of them had gotten mashed together, so that now a single track plays equal parts Hamza El Din and Madonna's "Borderline."]

Music has always been communal—drum circles, call-and-response, Homeric epics, folk songs—and even now, while it is being mass-produced onto little pieces of shiny plastic and broadcast via pre-programmed robo-DJs on Clear Channel. Hearing of my loss, my friends were more than happy to share their music with me. They passed on music I'd previously "owned", music I'd never heard, even music of their very own. Before long, again, I'd built up a "Tower of Song."

When God smites your tower a second time, can you really pretend to be surprised? When I lost my music last week, you could say I took it like a monk. "Life is ephemeral. There's always more music. Om."

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected."

Which might explain the almost equal nonchalance I felt at the end of that same week, when the music reappeared as suddenly as it had gone. Everything was in its right place.

*     *     *

When you have forty-two consecutive days of songs, there are bound to be some you haven't heard in a while. There are probably some you haven't heard at all. Until it came up on "shuffle," I'd completely forgotten the Trik Turner song from a couple years back, "Friends and Family." The song borrows its main guitar riff from another, fairly different song, one which at first I couldn't quite place. (I won't tell you what it is, in case you want to play "Name That Tune.")

What I love about the Trik Turner song: they don't sample the riff, but instead actually play it, copycat, on their own guitars. It reminds me that once upon a time, someone in this band (is his name Trik?) heard the song on the radio, liked it, shared it with his friends, learned to play it, and then changed it so that he could use it to tell his own story. Like a call-and-response. Like a folk song. Bringing communities together.

Sharing, it's worth remembering, is part of the aural tradition. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.