MP3:
Bojtor Imre - Budapest (2:52)
God damn, I hate CDs. It is not just that they don't sound quite right or that the music industry used them to pull off one of the biggest episodes of consumer fraud ever or that they forced so much bad music onto the world by making sure every mainstream pop artist had to fill 72 minutes full of,,,uhhh...filler. No, one of the biggest reason I hate CDs is that they snuffed out so many possibilities. Take the record cover. 12.5 inches by 12.5 inches of canvas waiting to be filled replaced by less than half that space. And that is just the beginning. The technology that made records possible is really flexible. You can press music onto vinyl and make records. You can press music onto thin plastic and make flexi discs which you then can put in magazines or books. Better yet, you can press onto very very very thin plastic and apply that plastic to the back of a cereal box and now you have little records by the Sugar Bears and the Archies. Or you can apply that plastic to the face of a picture postcard in a Soviet era Eastern European country and make a very cool little tourist artifact promoting the fine town of Budapest, Hungary. And that is what you get to hear today. A jaunty tune by Hungarian legend Bojtor Imre, the song Budapest sounds like it was recorded in a time and place long gone. Certainly Hungary isn't what it was in 1968 and no one is pressing records onto postcards any more. Oh yes, because this is a postcard record, the sound quality is not superb. There are a few bass surges, however should enjoy this song.
- Contributed by: Scott Soriano
Images: Postcard
Media: Postcard
Album: Budapest
Label: Colorvox
Catalog: ML.262-1.532/673
Credits: Bojtor Omre/Jaroka Sando es zenekara
Date: 1968
While I don't feel quite so strongly about CDs as you do, I feel your pain at the demise of the album cover. Which, by the way, to be nitpicky, at 4.75" X 4.715", a CD insert has only about 14%(!) of the surface area to be filled by gorgeous cover art as a LP.
Posted by: tng | March 13, 2007 at 11:18 AM
Well done and happy to see you here, I'm a big fan of crud crud and botb!
Posted by: jtm | March 13, 2007 at 09:01 PM
If you dig crud crud, please check out http://gibblegabble.blogspot.com/
Posted by: SS | March 13, 2007 at 09:26 PM
Thanks for the post. I'm happy to report that a friend mailed me a postcard from the Roy Rogers Museum with "Happy Trails" pressed on the outside, so maybe there is someone in the world still making these little wonders today...
Posted by: Chris R. | March 13, 2007 at 10:16 PM