Delivery Death March
An elegy for Columbia House’s mailorder music
“They were still around?”
That was my reaction when I read Tuesday that Columbia House filed for bankruptcy protection. In a world now dominated by freemium streaming, how had a company best known for its mail-order music business survived for this long?
Apparently there are at least 110,000 members who haven’t figured out how to cancel their credit cards yet.
For those too young to remember a world without iPods or MP3s, Columbia House was this company that used to ship you eight CDs for a penny in order to get you hooked into its mail-order record club. It was a great way to discover a bunch of music at once and learn about the vagaries of financial fine print, which was how the company recorded $1.4 billion in profits at its height. After the introductory deal, Columbia House would keep sending you regular-priced CDs, and they would charge your credit card for them, too.
Columbia House was re- sponsible for cultivating my own musical tastes outside of my parents’. The first cultural artifact I could truly claim as my own came to me as a gift from my only sister, Carol, who is 11 years older. It was the debut cassette of a hip-hop/ new jack swing group called Another Bad Creation. When “Coolin’ at the Playground Ya Know!” came out in 1991, our father saw Red, Chris, Mark, RoRo and David in their oversize puffy coats and blanched. To him they registered as menaces. Carol tried to explain that hip-hop was part of black culture.
“Not my culture!” my father growled back.
From that point on, it was clear my appreciation and understanding for pop culture, hip-hop culture especially, lay largely in Carol’s hands. She would order the musical contraband that barely registered as original compositions to our parents. We were a Charlie Parker and Tchaikovsky household, but once I became aware of their existence, I spent a lot of time recording Mariah Carey and Coolio off my see-through radio.
I idolized her, and Carol tried her best to inculcate me with some of her subversiveness. By the time I was in kindergarten, my sister was a student at a magnet boarding school 80 miles away.
The straight-A, goody two shoes expectations of my parents were hard to shake, though, and I was a giant theatre geek, so the first time she approached me and told me to pick a CD from the Columbia House order form, I chose Barbra Streisand’s “Back to Broadway.” It was such a treat. She’d allowed me a CD all my own, and I got to choose, without any judgment from our parents!
As my tastes matured, I knew that when Carol asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I could count on her to come through with some Mary J. Blige. She gave me “My Life” and “Share My World,” which basically served as the soundtrack for my high school years, played proudly on a hand-medown stereo that came from who else? Carol.
Now that we’re both adults with busy lives, we still converge over our musical tastes: an electric Janelle Monae concert where my sister dragged me to the edge of the stage because she knew I would never bother with it on my own, or a trip to see D’Angelo that we enjoyed separately, but always with the reassurance that the other was somewhere in the room enjoying some spiritual renewal at D’Angelo’s multi-instrument playing behest.
More than anything, we are unapologetic and slightly unhinged Mariah Carey fans, and I am still waiting for pop music’s glitteryest grand diva of pop to breeze through again so I can pay Carol back for the all the aural lifelines she gave me as a nerdy kid growing up in small town North Carolina, courtesy of Columbia House.