She actually toured UMaine that year, if you can believe it

[prog]

Listening to a particular Tori Amos song for the first time in a while, and it strikes me that the image evoked by the lyric "Greg he writes letters and burns his CDs" managed to completely reverse sometime between its publication in 1994 and today. Our moody friend Greg was originally destroying all his music, but now he's making more copies of it instead!

FWIW, discussion of this and other bits of the song here. From now on it's really quite impossible for me to hear those words and not think of this emo kid cranking away with iTunes while writing his emo fan letters, anachronism or not.

Comments

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Someone else pointed out that there's a similar reversal in the first sentence of Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Would that be grey, or bright blue?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Good one!

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I always imagined the sky full of static, though I knew that wasn't the intent.

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

That's always how I pictured it too; the sky basically just a flat panel of static "snow".

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Are you sure? From alt.cd-rom:

"Hell, I'll burn CD's for $30 a pop." --June 8, 1994

"For the most part though - the people who press the cd check for viruses before they burn cd-roms." --April 22, 1994

"I am acquainted with a person who has the capability to burn CD-ROMs." --December 9, 1992

Or if you prefer, from rec.music.cd:

"For BANDWIDTH, we used Optical Media International, the people who burn Emu's CD-ROM libraries for them." --February 28, 1994

"The blanks currently cost about $40 each. The equipment to burn them costs several thousand dollars." --March 13, 1994

The terminology was unfamiliar to me in 1994; but unlike me, Tori Amos was in the CD-recording business.

[prog.livejournal.com]

This possibility occurred to me. However, as you and I and most everyone who posted in the forum thread I linked to imply, an average listener in 1994 would interpret the line as meaning "he sets fire to his CDs (maybe metaphorically, maybe actually microwaving the suckers, who knows)", and I did not question this interpretation for over 10 years of knowing the song.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Others assume differently, though, like this guy, and these commenters.

(Someone in rec.music.tori-amos suggested that he sets fire to his certificates of deposit.)

So, I dunno, but I'm not sure it's obvious.