I’ve been influenced by a lot of things over the years, some good and some bad. But the biggest good one, the one that kept me sane through the boards and then engineering and opened up my mind, was a music CD called MTV Best.
MTV Best came from Abhinav, my neighbour and friend, the way most things did back then. He was in college and I was still in school, and my world was fairly limited: school, tuition, cricket, and that was about it. Abhinav had bought it first, and since his family had a desktop, he copied the songs onto the computer and sold me the disc itself for ₹20. It was a bootleg, of course, a copy of a copy, which in India back then was a grey area at best.
It came in a thin plastic sleeve with a black-and-white paper insert on each side. The front was a collage of photos of a few singers, and the back was a list of every song crammed onto the CD. The disc had a blue sticker on top. It went straight into the CD player by my study table and more or less stayed there.
Once I started listening to it, I got curious about what else each singer or band had made. This was before every household had the internet, so the only way to find out was an internet café, and I’d keep a list of names from the CD for the next trip. I rarely went alone. Two or three of us would pool our money and pedal our way to the café in Sector 10, where an hour cost ₹20 or ₹30, and that too at pathetic dial-up speeds, where downloading anything took an eternity. We took turns running our searches, crammed into those small chairs and cubicles. Learning anything about the world took effort back then, and that CD turned out to be my gateway to it.
Those lists were never short, because MP3s were big then. One CD could hold hundreds of songs because they were compressed to 128 kbps, sometimes as low as 64, a long way from the lossless and hi-res audio that streaming services offer today. MTV Best had around 150 of them, a lot of them soft rock. But it had a song for every mood. There was Eminem’s The Real Slim Shady when I wanted rap, Bon Jovi when I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, and Bryan Adams for the days that called for him. Love or heartbreak, everything was in there. It was one CD for life. I already liked English songs, but my love for English music really comes from that CD.
I played it so often that I still remember some of the track numbers more than twenty years later. Sting’s Desert Rose was the first or second track. Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life was 25. The Eagles’ Hotel California was 69, I’m almost sure, and Elton John’s Sacrifice was somewhere in the 70s. Chris de Burgh’s The Lady in Red was 86. Somewhere in there were Michael Learns to Rock’s Someday, Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called to Say I Love You, Lionel Richie’s Hello, Queen’s We Will Rock You and Bryan Adams’s Summer of ‘69.
It also came in handy to impress a girl from school, who would become the first person I ever shared music with. I wanted to give her a mix of my favourites, and back then that was a small project. There was a guy nearby who had a computer with a CD writer. He copied the songs I’d picked onto his desktop, burned them onto a fresh CD, and charged me something like ₹30. As far as I remember, it had The Lady in Red, Hotel California, Careless Whisper, Please Forgive Me, Hello and I Just Called to Say I Love You. She liked it so much that she copied the whole of MTV Best.
Looking back, it was such a struggle compared to how easy it is now to find a song and share it. The new way is easy. It just lacks the emotion, or the effort.
My own copy of MTV Best didn’t survive. After five or six years of heavy use, the disc had worn out. By 2007 a desktop had taken over my room, so I’d copied my CDs onto it, and from there onto my phone. Then the desktop needed formatting and the data went with it, and the CDs themselves disappeared during a clean-up. I was left with a few songs here and there, but never the original MP3s.
What I didn’t lose were all the artists I’d discovered through that CD, and one of them was Bryan Adams. MTV Best was my introduction to him, and I’m still a fan. When he toured India in October 2018, I went to Bangalore from Pune for the show and took my brother along. It was at Ozone Urbana, on the far outskirts of the city near the airport, and it was an open-air concert, so flights kept passing low overhead and drowning him out. It was a fever dream, a nostalgia overdose. He and his band are great performers, and he played all the ones I’d grown up with: 18 Til I Die, Please Forgive Me, Summer of ‘69, (Everything I Do) I Do It for You, Let’s Make a Night to Remember, Open Road, Cloud Number Nine. The Bangalore crowd did their part and made every song memorable.
Afterwards I told the girl I’d burned that mix for, still a friend all these years later, that my brother and I had been to see Bryan Adams, and she was a bit jealous. She lives in the States and still hadn’t been to one of his concerts.
The whole of MTV Best may still exist, too. She says the copy she made from mine is sitting in her Google Drive, all 150-odd songs of it. If it is, then she still has my MTV Best more than twenty years later, and I don’t. Just before sitting down to write this, I messaged her to ask for the songs. She hasn’t replied yet, and I’m starting to have my doubts that it’s there at all.
If she sends them, I’d like to burn them onto a CD and call it MTV Best again. The songs would be the same files, copied bit for bit from the ones I had in 2003, under the same name. Whether it would be the same CD is a modern take on the Ship of Theseus, and I don’t have an answer yet.
P.S. She replied after this post went up and sent me the files. There are 107 songs, not the 150-odd I remembered, with gaps here and there, but most of the ones I listened to the most are there, minus a few. The files still carry their old track numbers. The Lady in Red is 86, just as I said. Hotel California is 68, so I was off by one. The Ship of Theseus question just got harder, now that forty-odd planks are missing. She also insisted that I edit this post, so here it is.
