Remastering
Your grandfather has died after suffering six strokes in three years, and you’ve returned to Queens to help your parents sort through his earthly possessions and figure out what to donate to the Salvation Army and what to throw away and what you can maybe bring back to decorate your alarmingly spare Boston apartment with. In the attic you open a copy of Coping with the Death of Your Spouse and out falls an old picture of your grandfather at 19 standing in front of a B-17 Flying Fortress on a base in Britain smiling in the face of the death that narrowly missed him in the air in ‘44 and finally got him in a bed in Jamaica Hospital Medical Center last Tuesday, and you’re transfixed both by the content and the quality of the picture, the way the old picture looks, the product of contemporary technology that in 2011 can only be achieved intentionally with like say Instagram.
And then let’s say your mother, who in the years since she’s retired has become something of an amateur Photoshop pro, comes upstairs and you show her the picture and she marvels at it for a moment before scanning it into her MacBook and touching it up, removing the grain, brightening the colors, so that by the time she’s done with it it looks like an iPhone photo taken on the set of a some new World War Two film: the content is the same, but the murkiness that gave the photo its special quality is gone.
Which anyway is why I don’t understand remastering. Or, no: I get what remastering is, right, it’s dusting and turning the lights up in a room, it’s a half-decent excuse to sell nostalgia to people old enough to remember that weird period before music was free w/o having to bother with drudging up unlistenable demos and outtakes. But why would I want to engage with a copy of to take a recent example the Queen is Dead even slightly different from the Historical Queen is Dead, the one that teenagers who are now lawyers or dead or even music critics reviewing Smiths reissues sulked around to then, when its reputation was made? Who needs increased clarity when half the appeal of listening to music produced before you were born is essentially time-travel, hearing the past and using it to flesh out your vague notion of years not experienced firsthand? And this keep in mind is actually a question, if you’d like to answer it.
