The Impact of China's "Cracked CDs" on Re-TROS

I would rather spend my night together quietly with my wife or a few good friends, have a nice dinner, or watch a movie or read a book, or listen to some music. Rather than going out with a bunch of strangers and drinking myself to death, talking about the sorts of things I’m never interested in. I can live my life a more meaningful way than this.

To be honest, besides making music, I don’t have that many hobbies, I’m not that interested in doing things with others, I prefer to do things all by myself, like riding a bike or jogging in a park, go swimming or buying some records or books.

I love 70's/80's post-punk or new wave music, when I was a teenager I could spend the entire afternoon in a record store searching for the music I like.

Back then in China, it was quite difficult to find music from outside China except from what we called ‘cracked CDs’. They’d been shipped to China as plastic trash waiting to be recycled, when they went through the customs they were cut at the edge to make sure that they were “real trash’ and wouldn’t play. But we found that most of them could still be played in the CD player, often just the last few songs are destroyed and they were super cheap to buy.

So I spent a lot of time on trying to pick up those cracked CDs. All my happiness came from finding the CDs that I liked, especially after spending a couple of hours trying to pick them out from millions of records, sometimes I would find they weren’t even cut!

I can say that those cut-out CDs formed my youth music kingdom, even now, I still go to record stores to see what I can find, though there is lot more choice and we can even buy vinyl here in China at the same time it comes out in Europe or America.

Although those ‘cracked CDs’ have become history, my mood of finding good music in the record stores remains the same as 20 years ago.

I sometimes think that because it was really difficult to find music when I was a teenager, I would listen to the same record over and over again, really absorb it and remember every single detail in thatrecord.

Nowadays, it is so much easier to find the music online, I could download a dozen of records to my laptop or smart phone in a few minutes. However, as the quantity goes up, some of the “holy feeling” of listening to the music is lost. As it gets easier to find music, the less “holy” the music is, so now I would rather spend more time at home, pick out the record I like, put it into a player and listen to it very carefully, just like 20 years ago.