Parenting & Family Quote by Mike Rutherford

Rutherford’s joke lands because it’s built on a neat generational inversion: the “obsolete” format becomes so alien that a CD, once marketed as indestructible perfection, is treated like a fragile, temperamental artifact. The image of a kid returning a “faulty disc” isn’t really about defect rates; it’s about a shifting baseline for what music is supposed to feel like. If you grow up on instant, invisible streams, the idea that listening involves a physical object you can scratch, lose, or argue about with a shop owner starts to seem quaint in the way rotary phones do.

There’s also a musician’s sly self-awareness here. Rutherford came up in an era when formats dictated rituals: flipping a record, reading liner notes, making peace with pops and hiss. His humor carries a faint defensiveness, not as nostalgia for its own sake, but as a recognition that every technological “upgrade” quietly deletes a culture of use. You don’t just lose vinyl; you lose the habit of going somewhere to buy music, the minor drama of returns and replacements, the social infrastructure that made a scene legible.

The subtext is less “kids these days” than “look how fast our certainties get reclassified as trivia.” Vinyl was supposed to be gone; it came back as fetish object. CDs were supposed to be forever; they became landfill. Rutherford needles the myth of progress by pointing out how quickly yesterday’s premium becomes tomorrow’s misunderstanding.