Why We Miss CDs: The Lost Art of Music Rituals

I miss CDs.

Not in the “everything was better in the old days” kind of way. I am no technophobe. Spotify is convenient. Apple Music has introduced me to artists I might never otherwise have found. There is genuine joy in having the history of recorded music sitting in your pocket.

But when music stopped being something we physically held, we lost more than a format.

We lost a ritual.

We lost a way of experiencing music that made listening active, not passive.

I still remember my first two CDs: Mariah Carey’s Music Box and Janet Jackson’s janet.

It was 1993 or 1994. My mother surprised me with them, and I can still remember the excitement of holding both CDs in my hands. They felt like treasure. Two albums, two energies, and somehow both are perfect entry points into music obsession.

Music Box turned me into a Mariah Carey stan, a condition from which I have never recovered. janet., meanwhile, inspired an entirely disproportionate determination to get the lyrics to “If” exactly right.

Even at ten, I knew “Any Time, Any Place” was naughty. That only made the experience more thrilling. Janet’s music felt sophisticated and slightly scandalous, and I was determined to know every lyric.

Because listening to music was never just listening.

There were the lyrics in the booklet, the photographs, the fonts, the feel of the paper, and the song sequencing. You could spend hours with an album before or after pressing play.

And then there were the liner notes.

Without realising it, liner notes became my first education in how music was made. Writers. Producers. Co-writers. Samples. Session musicians.

And because I was a Mariah stan, I paid attention.

That is where I learned that she was not simply “the voice.” She was writing the songs. Nearly every track had her name in the credits. That mattered to me. It changed how I heard her.

Then I started noticing the other names around her. Walter Afanasieff was everywhere in those early albums, then less so after Butterfly, and gone after Rainbow. C+C Music Factory turned up on several albums. Babyface was there on “Never Forget You,” and later on “Melt Away.” Missy Elliott co-produced “Babydoll.” Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were there by Rainbow and then became more visibly part of the sound from Charmbracelet onwards. Later still, The-Dream and Tricky Stewart co-shaped Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, though Mariah was still very much Mariah: writer, producer, executive producer, and architect of the thing.

The names became a trail.

Once you noticed them in one place, you started noticing them everywhere.

That was how Babyface became legible to me, too. First, he was a name in the credits. Then he was a sound. Whitney. Toni. Mariah. Madonna.

That is when you started listening differently.

Take Madonna’s Bedtime Stories. Babyface helps explain some of the album’s warmer, more R&B-inflected texture. But then there is “Bedtime Story,” the song, with Björk’s involvement, quietly pointing somewhere else entirely. And then “Inside of Me” samples Aaliyah’s “Back & Forth.” Aaliyah in a Madonna track? I clocked that.

By the time Ray of Light arrives, everything has shifted. Different collaborators. Different textures. William Orbit. Different emotional weather.

That was the thing about liner notes. They made you listen differently. Suddenly, every album had a trail you could follow.

The CD booklet was not just packaging.

It was a portal.

My next CD was Boyz II Men’s II. By then, I was fully committed to the emotional seriousness of 90s R&B. I would have been in sixth grade, maybe early seventh. It was 1995. I was freshly imported to the United States and trying, in some ways, to find my footing.

I even wrote a letter to the Boyz II Men fan club.

I never sent it, but I wrote it. The address was in the booklet, of course. That was the thing about CDs: artists felt oddly reachable, even if not accessible. There was a possibility, however slim, that someone might read what a melodramatic preteen from Pretoria had to say about harmonies and heartbreak.

The CD booklet did not simply accompany the music. It extended the experience. Lyrics, photos, thank-yous, credits, fan club addresses: entire worlds folded into tiny pages you could revisit again and again.

You had to work for your music.

That sounds unbearably early millennial, but it is true.

Music was effort. Intention. Sometimes strategy.

I practically lived at Look & Listen at Menlyn Mall. Rows of CDs filled the racks: R&B, Pop, Gospel (hello, Kirk Franklin and the Nu Nation. Stomp!), Hip-Hop, and soundtracks.

Entire worlds were organised alphabetically.

And then there were the listening stations.

I spent hours there, moving from CD to CD and genre to genre, deciding whether an album deserved my money. Sometimes I had no intention of buying anything. Sometimes the mission was reconnaissance: track the price, compare stores, and decide whether release day was worth it.

The challenge was never the CD.

The challenge was the price.

Release day or wait a little?

Best Buy or Sam Goody at Tysons Corner?

Music, Top CD, or Look & Listen when I was back in South Africa?

There were always choices to be weighed.

My mother and I often visited our favourite CD store in D.C.

I remember an epic trip with my cousin from Brooklyn to Manhattan because there was a store with good CD prices. He was into grunge. I was decidedly not.

And occasionally, an actual existential crisis would present itself.

Mariah Carey’s #1s and Whitney Houston’s My Love Is Your Love were released on the same day. I could only buy one.

Mariah won.

Of course.

Some loyalties are simply not negotiable.

Back in Pretoria, there was the ritual of walking down Esselen Street to my CD shop or to the side vendors. Hello, Macy Gray!

My mother knew my obsession well. Pretoria East to Sunnyside for CDs became, in my mind at least, a normal request for a teenager to make.

Repeatedly.

And then there were the long phone calls.

The kind where half the conversation was spent sitting in front of the CD player so you and your friend could play your favourite songs for each other.

I may have had some vague understanding of phone bills.

I did not care.

Then there were the regional betrayals.

Moving countries taught me that albums changed depending on where you bought them. Different countries meant different track lists. Bonus tracks if you were lucky. Deep disappointment if you were not.

But every now and then, you won.

I had the South African version of Music Box, which meant I had “Everything Fades Away.”

A superior arrangement of circumstances, frankly.

I have one very specific memory.

I am sitting outside the front door. The sun is setting. The sky is pink. Quiet hangs in the air. “Everything Fades Away” is playing.

And for a moment, everything aligns.

The music. The evening. The feeling of being entirely inside yourself without feeling lonely.

Memory is a liar, of course. I could swear there was a rosy tint to the afternoon.

There probably was not.

But the feeling had one.

And maybe that is what I miss.

Not just CDs.

Not even the mixtapes, though Lord knows I miss those too.

I miss the effort of it all.

The curation.

The anticipation.

The way music once asked us to participate.

And in return, revealed entire worlds.