This is a complaint – about modern times, on behalf of my music collection.

I’m not often inclined to quote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But, when it comes to the song “I’m Free” by the Rolling Stones (in particular), to the various iterations of said music collection (in general) and to the experience of my generation (in even-more general), Marx and Engels were onto something. “All that is solid,” as they put it, does indeed “melt into air.”

I owned the December’s Children record album by the Stones more or less since it was released – in December (natch) 1965. It was a US-only release. And it included (it would be wrong to say “featured”) “I’m Free.”

Purchasing December’s Children did not require being particularly with-it or hip, I acknowledge. The Rolling Stones by then were unavoidable, having had the number one song in the United States five months earlier – a song that packed as much of a wallop as any song ever, despite being burdened by a parenthesis in the title: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Nor was my taste at the time developed enough to realize that the big hits on December’s Children – the characteristically nasty “Get Off of My Cloud” and the uncharacteristically maudlin “As Tears Go” – might be outshined by “I’m Free.” (I also admit to being blithely unaware at the time that “I’m Free” – “to do what I want any-old time” – is a great retirement song.)

But I liked it:  dropped the needle of my record player on it with surprising frequency – adding scratches (an audiophile I ain’t), dancing around the room, miming freedom.

But then “I’m Free” was lost to me. My treasured collection of a hundred or so similarly scratched records – which we never prized as “vinyl” – had become, in the final decades of the 20th century, obsolete. CDs – which didn’t require a needle, which didn’t have to be turned over halfway through, which allegedly did not scratch – were taking over. My record player had broken and didn’t seem worth fixing and my record collection had “melted into air.” I sold what was left of this testament to whatever with-it-ness and hipness I had managed to achieve, this repository of most of the most powerful emotions of my youth, for thirty bucks somewhere downtown.

I invested only begrudgingly in CDs. I wasn’t about to kowtow to the record companies and re-buy the CD version of December’s Children. I did spring for a CD of Hot Rocks, a Rolling Stones greatest hits collection. “I’m Free” wasn’t on it. Fortunately, the song did show up on a 1995 Stones-live CD I later bought, Stripped.

And then technology seemed actually to do me a solid. I figured out that I could transfer songs from CDs onto cassette tapes – which we did not yet call “mix tapes.” I was living in the suburbs. I could play these tapes in the car.

Moreover, these cassettes featured, miraculously, Only The Songs I Really Liked. “I’m Free”-live was quickly relocated to a cassette, as was “Beast of Burden” and “Mixed Emotions.” I was able to pair one great song by John – “Ticket to Ride” – with one by Paul – “Drive My Car.” I transferred Bruce’s “Brilliant Disguise” to a cassette, along with “Lucinda’s “Right in Time,” Aretha’s “Natural Woman,” Leonard’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep” and Bob’s “Jokerman.” I put considerable thought into these cassette tapes: a couple of just jazz, one from spring, one from summer; at least one a year.

And then – predictably, though of course I failed to anticipate it – the cassette players started disappearing from cars. I was less upset to watch the CD players, too, melting into air. I ended up misplacing my collection of cassette tapes – but by then it didn’t matter. I no longer had any way to play them.

I kind of liked the next iteration: Apple’s iTunes: You could buy individual songs and put them in mixes. And my iPhone worked in my car. But, of course, Apple soon enough started sabotaging iTunes to clear the way for Apple Music, its version of Spotify. And in the process of transferring to a new phone a few years ago all my iTunes mixes somehow disappeared. I now – typically – have more or less nothing to show for the money I spent over the years on iTunes.

And all this obsolescence – planned or otherwise – hasn’t just wiped-out ways of listening to music: Home telephones, phone booths and 411, as you may have noticed, are long gone. Cash money is currently in the process of melting into our increasingly smoky air, as are TVs and movie theaters. Retail stores are also – thank you Mr. Bezos – in sharp decline.  

My generation – the one that came of age with tube TVs and typewriters – has been condemned to watch this drama over and over and over again: yesterday’s shinny-new thing become tomorrow’s hopelessly antiquated relic. We are the “melt-into-air” generation – struggling to find our way in a flickering, unstable world. Unless that was our parents, some of whom could remember horse-drawn carriages. Unless our children prove to be the here-then-gone champs. Unless perpetual flux is an inevitable consequence of a market economy.

Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels are not known for the accuracy of their prognostications, but – in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto – they nailed this aspect of capitalism. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions…. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air….” (Marshall Berman used this last sentence as the title of his marvelous 1982 book on modernity, written at the end of the age of records.)

I resisted Spotify and its imitators for a number of years – cause I’m pissed at every purveyor of music I ever had the misfortune to patronize, cause I didn’t want to have to do it all yet again. But I succumbed, finally, to Amazon Music, which my wife gets free (I think) with her Prime subscription. And I spent some time assembling a “Playlist” – “Mitch 2023,” 173 extraordinary songs, “I’m Free” among them.

But now I read that the subscription model for music, TV and film is in trouble….