As a kid in the ‘80s, there’s one thing I loved: Side A and Side B.  That’s right, my young friends.  We didn’t have mp3s--or, for a while, even CDs.  We had cassette tapes, and they had the best two things in the world: Track #1 from Side A and Side B.

Why was this so good?  Because the creators always put catchiest, most interesting tracks up front.  Those are the ones which are supposed to grab your attention and make you listen to the whole album.  Sometimes they were the singles, but not always.

Here’s a dumb example.  I never liked Paul Young, best known for “Every Time You Go Away.” He was a big haired, annoying ‘80s goofball. But the first track of one of his albums is a great song called “Bite the Hand that Feeds Me.” This song had way more hooks and production than anything else on the album, because it was the kickoff track.  See what I mean?  You could be a no-talent dingleberried diptard and still manage to squeeze off a good Side A, Side B, or both.  Every time you put in a cassette on either side, you know you were getting the album’s best shot.

But then CDs came along.  I distinctly remember reading an interview with Don Was, who produced Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time.  He said, “CDs will change everything.  You won’t have Side B anymore.  Instead, all the strongest tracks will be frontloaded at the start of the album, because you never know if the listener will get all the way to where Side B used to exist.”

If you actually listen to Nick of Time, you realize that Was had already adjusted his music strategy.  All the catchiest songs, like “Thing Called Love” and “Love Letter,” are on the first half of the album.  Then it kind of peters out.  Was’s prediction came true, and most CDs are now structured exactly like this.  Somewhere around the late ‘80s, I thought to myself “Fine.  So I don’t get Side B anymore. But Side A will never leave me.”

You know what?  Even Side A is now in jeopardy.

It’s still around, but it’s an endangered species.  Mp3s are changing the landscape yet again.  We hardly even listen to albums anymore, preferring to rip songs from own collection and yank tracks down off the Internet, leaving behind the bloodied corpses of the albums they came from.  The best albums always had an internal logic to them--you could listen from beginning to end and not just hear a collection of songs, but feel as though you had an experience.  Now songs are now disembodied and without context, inhabiting Playlist spaces in random assortments.  Musicians will start to make records just as an exercise in Playlist Fulfillment, not as works of art unto themselves.

I feel a little sad about it.  But ultimately I don’t care.

Because God, I love the experience of that massive playlist.  3,000 songs on “Shuffle"--a substantial chunk of anything of consequence that I’ve ever listened to.  With the headphones in place, I often feel like a big, dumb, walking A.M. radio station: “Welcome back to GREG IN THE MORNING!  Featuring cherished classics from the ‘70s!  the ‘80s!  the ‘90s!  And last week!”

Well, also the ‘50s and ‘60s.  I’ve got your “Bee Bop a Lula” right here, fella.

Yeah, there’s no order or structure.  It doesn’t meticulously meld together to form an organic whole.  But instead it does something that may even be better.  It relentlessly hurls bits of my past and present at me like a drunken carnival knife thrower.  It’s like sunlight glancing off a windshield; it’s blinding, and chaotic, and gorgeous.