If you're old like me, you can remember a time before the media went social, back when everybody watched the same television shows on large boxes and carved our music into round discs using stone knives and clay amplifiers. Because we were still ignorant and ungoogled, it was possible to find a random album or cassette at a store and take it home knowing absolutely nothing about it.

This experience of blind faith — in personal taste, cover art or capitalism, depending on your perspective — has, along with thunder lizards and Coke in green glass bottles, largely vanished from the earth. And, you know, that's mostly a good thing; buying blind usually meant buying crap, and while you might feel adventurous purchasing some Alison Krauss cassette without really knowing who she was from some random Coconuts back in the early 1990s, the truth is that you were just clueless, kid. Still... haven't we lost something when we no longer have the ability to be clueless and feel adventurous? The internet has granted us knowledge, but now that we’ve eaten the apple, the snake hisses in our ear that everybody and their cousin had already discovered that watered-down bluegrass already, so cover your nudity and feel ashamed.

I was kind of thrilled a couple of weeks ago when I discovered that the bookstore in Mitsuwa, the amazing Japanese mall just outside Chicago, was having a clearance sale, which meant that their selection of massively expensive imported CDs moved square into my price range. Since I can't read Japanese, and don't have an iPhone, I was able to spend four bucks and buy Jun Fukamachi's Golden Best without having any idea what it was outside of the limited context clues suggested by the cover: a Japanese man with an all-white 70s outfit with shaggy 70s hair, an aggressive 70s mustache, and big-old 70s glasses, sitting surrounded by keyboards.

My initial guess was that I had purchased some crazy-ass 70s Japanese electronic fusion weirdness. I unwrapped it with trembling fingers, put it in the car player, crossed my fingers, and got... heartfelt piano music. I had apparently bought an album by the Japanese Billy Joel. The second track had a spacey, hippie easy-listening vibe which suggested that I had purchased an album by the Japanese James Taylor, but! track 3! Track 3 was where it all came together. "Stick Freighter" starts out with that cheesy, fruity muzak repetitive funk strut, and then tosses in the burbling video game effects from before there were video games — the corny feel good crescendos counterpointed with anticlimactic cutesy spits, followed by an incongruous, fiery rock solo. The rest of the album follows that blueprint. "The Sea of Dirac" is cutesy carnival music for winking space hippies; Raymond Scott's Loony Tune soundtracks rearranged for electronics and meth. "Plastic Echelon" betrays its artificial title by including real honest to goodness horns; the track sounds like On the Corner-era Miles, if Miles were afflicted simultaneously with ADD and a bad case of flatulence.

Of course, I later returned to my house, where the entire accumulated wisdom of the ages sat amidst the clutter of my desk, waiting to enlighten and/or rob life of all its mystery. My search engine informed me me that Jun Fukamachi is more or less who I thought he was; a Japanese jazz-fusion composer, pianist and pioneering synthesizer player who performed with a number of American acts, including the Brecker Brothers and Steve Gadd. He also remade the entire Sgt. Pepper's album using electronics, which doesn't sound like a good idea at all, honestly. From what I can tell, though, I did in fact get a bargain; his albums are not easy to find, and those that are available cost a lot more than four bucks.

There's definitely a thrill in feeling like you've discovered something new that nobody else knows about — a thrill much reduced when you poke around YouTube as I did for this article and discover that lots of people know who the guy is and that as much of his music as you could desire is just a click and a point away. Music used to be a secret, hidden by the barriers of nation and region and history, and you could prove that you could feel a sense of knowledge or at least discovery by finding out what was on the other side of that (not necessarily large) hillock over there. Now all the hillocks are leveled, or at least the internet elevates us so that we can look over them anytime we want. In some sense that makes us more cosmopolitan. We can listen to more content from more places. But when you can see over every hillock, the grass there stops looking greener and starts looking just like your grass.

Sure, the old-style sense of exoticism–feeling like you have special access to another culture because you picked up a bargain CD–is creepy. But the modern sense of media where every culture is spread out in an instantly accessible smorgasbord for consumption has its disturbing aspects as well. The cultural imperialism of appropriating someone else's cultural realness has transformed into a cultural imperialism where there is no other culture to appropriate — just a single, flat, internet-mediated mono-world. You don't need to condescendingly anthropologize Robert Johnson any more; he's always already been blandly digitized.

Like most people, I indulge in the new-style creepiness pretty often, so it's nice to vary it and recapture the old, even momentarily. I got one other mystery album at the same time: Masayoshi Takanaka's Golden Best. I think it's more fusion, but I don't know for sure–and I'm not going to google him till I've actually listened to it. Maybe he's the Japanese Alison Krauss. Maybe he's the awesomest awesome thing that ever had a golden best. Who knows? Such are the joys of youth and ignorance — now mostly vanished from the world, but still available, in small doses, to monoglots lacking smartphones.