I am behind with the high- technology regarding in-car entertainment these days. Many of my friends use USBs short for Universal Serial Bus sometimes called flash drives with pre-recorded music in their cars for listening while driving.
I was alarmed to notice that after sending my car for a full service at a reputable garage in Harare, it was delivered back to me without around forty CDs which I had stored in the car’s glove compartment. One of the service mechanics had obviously helped himself to my CD collection. On investigation, I was lucky to find out that these CDs had been transferred to one of the mechanic’s car. He was immediately sacked on the spot for theft.
I began to ask myself whether I needed to carry so many CDs in my car as one can only play a few during a 3 to 4 hour journey.
The reason I carry my favourite CDs in my car is due to the fact that when I drive for a long distance, while listening to a radio station broadcasting from either ZBC or Zi-FM, the tyranny of choice (not to mention the lure of nostalgia) can make the comparatively in-car CD player, or multi-disc changer, if you were fancy, seem highly attractive. Hold on to them if you’ve got them: Some times on long distance drives, there is so much interference in the waves so that you cannot have full reception of what is being broadcast. This is when a CD player comes in handy. Location is said to be one of the most important things for radio reception. Steel and concrete can have a noticeable effect on radio reception. It’s most ideal if your radio is higher up, without obstruction, and closer to the transmitter. If you want to continue to listen to music where there is no reception, the CD player becomes ideal.
However, the technology of the CD player is changing really fast. From now on, car manufacturers in the UK and elsewhere in Europe (the countries where most of our cars are manufactured) will no longer include CD players on new models. The final outlier, the Subaru Forester, has been revamped without one. Instead, new car stereos will be geared towards streaming, making the staple of the last 50 years of in-car entertainment obsolete.
So ZBC officer, there is no need to continually ask me for a radio listeners’ licence when I am driving in my car as most modern cars are being manufactured without radios or CD players. You have to change that policy fast.
I am saying this because only last week, I was stopped by a traffic police officer who wanted to see if I had paid my road tax and insurance. After seeing these, he ushered me to a nearby ZBC officer to check for my radio licence. I told the ZBC guy that I only played CDs in my car and I only listen to the radio at night from my home. Besides, my car radio stopped working two years ago. He said that I needed to remove the CD gadget from my car. I could not see the rationale behind paying for a service I do not use just because my car was built with one. We left it unresolved as I argued that I needed this matter resolved in court.
Modern car manufacturers have decided to leave out CD players and radios built into their cars. This is not to deprive ZBC of its much-needed revenue, but to deal with the modern needs of their customers. They have their customers to decide what kind of gadgets they need in their cars for entertainment instead of restricting them to CD players or radios.
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Car manufacturers have stopped including CD players as most drivers use streaming or spotify – but with greater choice, are we losing something too?
The booming bass of the car CD player is lost instantly with this new technology.
But you can’t really argue with the inevitable march of history, nor justify making extra versions of cars just to serve a small minority. You could argue that in-car CD players have an appealing simplicity compared to the pitfalls of connecting phones through unreliable radio stations. The only real case for what is soon to be lost, I think, is that of a limited selection of music in the car forcing you to spend time with it, forging deep and often weird attachments – sometimes to entirely unexpected records – in the process. When I come across a car that has the same old red inflatable CD holder on the dashboard as I used to have, I feel a furious pang for the 12 painstakingly selected albums mine used to contain.
No music fan is going to lament a state of affairs in which technology means that you could feasibly drive without listening to music, but with advances in this technology, one is obliged to try and cope with what is going on. Me included.
At the same time as car CD players became commonplace in the 90s, Zimbabwean supermarkets were giving over significant square footage to entertainment sections during the CD boom. Their parallel rise gave way to a new era of signings that the whole family could listen to in the car without risk or fear of coming across songs with vulgar lyrics. The whole family could listen to songs such as Mapurisa by Andy Brown, MuGarden by Winky D, Zimbabwe by Thomas Mapfumo, Leonard Zhakata’s Mugove, Chitekete by Leonard Dembo, Simukai by the PIED Pipers or Chiwoniso Maraire’s Mandirasa and Kutambura by the Bhundu Boys without questioning the selection.
These songs are for good family listenership when driving together, but there could be one member of the family who does not like this kind of music when on a long drive.
A certain stripe of music fan would find this entirely lamentable, a moment paving the way for the rise of the “new boring”. But if there is fondness to be had here, it’s for one of the last communal family listening experiences, even if it only gave you something to chafe against, jamming on your headphones in the back seat to listen to the very anarchist and entirely non-corporate sounds of, for example, Holy Ten on your MiniDisc player instead.
The last time I regularly drove a car with a CD player, the door pocket selections were Ndangariro by Thomas Mapfumo and Nyarara Mwanawe by Oliver Mtukudzi giving me an enduring fondness for each one.
I still enjoy these two artistes when on a long drive.
Now, I know there’s an upside to it, from a collector’s standpoint, as their CDs can be found so cheaply these days. If one walks into the streets of Harare, it is easy to find such CDs (although mostly pirated) for only a dollar each. But it still gets on my nerves that so many people these days only use Spotify/their phones to listen to music when CDs sound objectively better in most cases, and come with nifty booklets. The more I think about it, the more I realise CDs are incredibly underrated. CDs are a good blend of digital and physical, offering sharp, high-quality, digital sound with the tactile ritual of physical media. Usually when one technology is replaced by another, it’s because it’s objectively better, as was the case with DVD replacing VHS, or CDs replacing cassettes etc., but Spotify is not an improvement over CDs from a sound quality standpoint at all. Music streamed on my phone sounds so tinny and awful, that it’s borderline un-listenable to me. I don’t think that’s just nostalgia goggles or a placebo effect talking. People will say they “only listen to digital music”, but um, CDs are a digital medium already. I remember being forced to buy a CD player after winning 5 CDs at a radio competition. At that point, I dropped the use of all my vinyl records but with changes in technology, I will have to wait for the CD to be completely obsolute.
It looks like I will continue to listen to CDs at home in a relaxed atmosphere without fear of losing them in my car as I am not one who will be forced to go with the wind whichever way it blows.
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