An Inconvenient Truth: Music ⭐

This is difficult to explain because I don't understand it myself, but there are certain words and terms that just rub me the wrong way. And the list of those keeps growing, perhaps because I'm getting older or maybe it's just that language is misused more these days. I don't know, it could be both, and I suppose why doesn't matter. It just is.

I see this all over, but in our little corner of the world, personal technology, there are too many examples to count. One particularly obnoxious example is "daily carry," which I feel says more about the overinflated ego of the idiots who think that documenting what they carry in their pockets or in some man purse every day somehow elevates them to the status of a marine storming the beaches of Normandy in World War II. And then there's one that's a bit more closely tied to this topic. Self-hosting.

Like daily carry, self-hosting suggests both importance and expertise, as if the writer who uses this term is somehow doing something technical and impressive, when in fact it simply refers to the way just about all of us did things not so long ago. Things, in this case, meaning you have ownership and control of your media, documents, and other data. You know, like a teenager in the 1950s might have kept a record player and vinyl records in their bedroom, when their daily carry consisted of a few coins a Davey Crockett coonskin cap. So impressive.

In my lifetime, the world has evolved rapidly and in every direction, and it feels like that's been escalating in recent years. (Which, again, may just be age.) Thinking just about music to keep things simple, we had radios with FM and AM stations we could listen to but not control, at home, in cars, and in portable players. And then there was a series of advances in media like vinyl records, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, and audio CDs, with some of those advances crossing over into that daily carry category, meaning they were portable and could come with you, in a car or with some portable player.

These advances, some of which were two steps forward and one step back, were all about freedom to me and so many other music lovers. I bought my first 45s (singles) and 33s (albums) in vinyl form as a child, in my pre-teen years, and I was always thrilled to be able to play what I wanted when I wanted to hear it. I never got tired of this and I always wanted more.

Which worked out well because things kept getting better. Cassette tapes gave me the ability to mix and match that music, starting with an inexpensive Sears all-in-one home unit with a turntable and two cassette decks. In the summer of 1983, I would walk across the Francis Scott Key Bridge between our hotel in Arlington, Virginia and Georgetown on the edge of Washington D.C., listening to the radio on a portable player. By 1984, that had been replaced with my own music courtesy of a gorgeous yellow Sony Walkman cassette player. I could finally take my cassette-based mixes--what we would...