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Vinyl: Ritual and Revolution
04/17/2009 I've never been one to wax nostalgic on a particular medium for music. I grew up during the cassette era and was an avid collector during its death. I now see its re-emergence as an icon, a symbol for DIY, the mixed tape: a keep sake, a locket - no real function, a more or less useless memorabilia - an ancient artifact for increasingly ancient times. When cassettes gave way to CDs, I was a few years behind its time. But once I jumped on that scene I couldn't deny the sheer force of the quality. Cassette tape ages and fades the sound, the volume (because I'm a girl about volume) diminishes and the music's intricacies are blurred or lost. But now as technological advancement quickens, mp3's are usurping (or have usurped) the comparatively brief reign of CDs. Yea sure, they don't scratch, and they're pocket-size portable, but I admittedly lament the death of both cassettes and CDs. As Frankfurtian as I am, as anti-commodity as I am, I'm first and foremost a music connoisseur and collector. My agenda here is not simply supporting musicians that wreck pleasurable havoc upon your ears - I'm talking about the sheer ritual of skimming over your collection to find what you want to hear. It's going over the titles, looking at their physical visuals and immediately recalling the sounds beneath your eyes' perception. Remembering (maybe even anticipating) what the sounds are, how they make you feel and all the complicated memories attached to them. Maybe I'm stubborn and stodgy, but I don't get that from putting my mp3 player or computer on random and letting it all drift through files. There's just something about making the choice of music, choosing it, gearing it up for play and letting it blast off. I was born way past the golden age, yes golden age, of vinyl. Yet, I had grown up with it. My parents were kids of the 70's and in my imagination their adolescent existence was not unlike the movie Dazed and Confused. They loved music, they continue to do so. Growing up, I consumed my own music on cassettes. But every once in a while my parents would bust out the vinyl collection and re-live the dream. My mom would spread the sleeves out over the floor, we'd look at them. She'd pick what she wanted to hear, and I would pick what looked like a cool record. When I was old enough to work the mechanisms, and could be trusted with the handling the precious heirlooms, I'd keep the albums in my room and play them on my own small toy-sized turntable. But, like much of the audio equipment made after 1990, my tiny black Sony stereo eventually broke. My parents bought their own new "amazing" Aiwa, replete with five CD changer and all the pretty little tech drippings (mainly just flashing lights). They bestowed upon me their old stereo - a 1979 Panasonic: bronze brown, huge silver knobs, switches, no freakin buttons whatsoever (unless you count the reset on the tape counter). It's heaven. It's a prized possession and I still use it heavily everyday. Unfortunately, in my own teen years, the turntable's needle wore down. My parents didn't feel any necessity in replacing it, and I had since bought all my favorite vinyl on cassette. Oh, and their Aiwa broke within the year. This highly fanciful and flowery anecdote all leads up to my reconnection with the magic of vinyl. It had originally started as campy decoration; finding ridiculous sleeves and framing them for wall-art. Ringo Starr's Goodbye Vienna currently hangs over my bed (yea, look it up). Yet, as I was going through dusty stacks of moldy sleeves I was seeing all kinds of amazing things for three dollars that my weak-willed, music-collector self couldn't simply walk away from. I started buying. Problem was, I had nothing to play them on. At the time of this superficially useless splurge, a lot of my friends were raving about the superiority of vinyl's sound quality. While I myself can hear the audible difference, I'm always reluctant to make hierarchical decisions between CDs and vinyl. That said, when I went home, I pulled the "old turntable off the shelf," dusted it, and with a few of my parents records, packed it in my suitcase and flew it down South. After a few repairs and a needle replacement (thanks again Kitchen Music for your fantastic job), I was ready to rock like it was 1975. The fundamental point. As I said, I'm no advocate for any particular medium. But once I restarted on the vinyl circuit I truly believe there is something special about vinyl, something that's just fuckin sweet about vinyl. I personally don't think it's about sound quality though. It's about process. About ritual. Maybe even about rite. I dunno. Maybe I'm just crazy, but since I started playing vinyl again, I feel like I'm coming back to innocent love of music. It extends to playing CDs, yes, but I just missed this without vinyl. Please indulge my the magniloquent description of process below. But hey, I'm just trying to illustrate... Next time you go to play whatever music on whatever medium, just think about the process of playing it. It's actually quite amazing. I sit cross-legged in front of my storage shelf like a reverent disciple. One by one I flip. Yea, I'm wasting time by making a play-list stack, but in my mind it'll be worth it. I'm feeling especially "classic" today. I sort out: Creedence's Chronicles, Animals' Best of the Animals, the essential Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, I hesitate but opt for Introducing the Beau Brummels, Heart, Best of Cream, Hendrix Electric Ladyland, Fleetwood Mac's Rumors, Rolling Stone's Magic in the Shade, The Grass Roots Golden Grass Roots. And what the hell, for a little bit of diversity from rock I pick up History of Otis Redding, the Dells Sweet as Funk Can Be, the always cherished Foxy Brown soundtrack and for a cool down lap Segovia's My Favorite Spanish Encores. I intend to play these in this order thinking it'll be a wild musical journey. I let disc one of Chronicles slide out from its encasement onto my hands. Careful to catch it on my fingertips at the disc's center. Holding it by the balls of my palms, I can't help but to do the cheesy flip around before I center the record on the turntable's axis. Looking at the shiny black of the material, you can see the grooves of the records. You just KNOW that each of the grooves represent some sound you're about to hear. You don't get that with CDs. I'm sorry, to be overly symbolic about it; with CDs you get nothing but a rainbow efxed mirror image of yourself. As if your CD is some sort of ego masturbation of your taste. With vinyl, the non-reflection is like some vague void to get sucked into: Alice's odyssean trip down the rabbit hole. Once the record is fixed in its place you're ready to spin. You bend down eye level-ish to the table. You take the index finger, the one finger because it's delicate like that. You situate the needle in the exact place - maybe you wanna play a certain song, maybe you don't. Once the needle is there you flip the rpm switch and the revolution begins. And so it goes. No matter what the tempo of the music is, the disc itself spins in an offsetting pace. Needle drops. It falls slowly making a timid but sure connect with the spinning record. If you've placed the needle just right, you're going to hear the characteristic scratches of idle space before the track. Crashes of cymbals fade in like ominous lightening tickling the horizon as the storm draws in. "Suzie Q," Fogerty menaces and exalts with his idiosyncratic rasp of rock-blues. And you don't care! You don't care that this California band ripped off Southern blues aesthetic. You don't care about Fogerty's solo work. You don't care that CCR is cliché. Because if you're listening, really listening, you can't deny that all enveloping urge to shake your hips just that little bit. And if you do care, why did you go through all that time and detail? I hope I'm not the only one and that this isn't any transparent ploy about being Hi-Fidelity-ish Elizabeth Wurtzel about it. But god damn. I don't care what the sound quality is, I just love getting to the sound. Next time you think about consuming music give a thought to how it's consumed you. IPod's latest "Genius" feature boasts the ability to choose your music for you ("Your own personal DJ")... Yea, that's convenient, but whatever happened to taking the time for a little bit of consciousness? Whatever happened to selection? Or select? Now, I will lend that today's technological advancement of Myspace, last.fm, pandora etc, allows people to plug into music regardless of big-industry backing, geography, possibly even time. I celebrate - and abuse - the fact that anything there is to hear is at the computer savvy's indiscriminate disposal; that we can accumulate and shuffle through decades and time zones of recorded media. However, as we amass our collection and tour-shuffle through our playlists, I wonder and worry about how we connect with the music. Right now I can bring up my iTunes and shuffle through hours of random songs (some I know, some waiting to be heard), and I can finish this article as musical resonance drifts in through headphones designed to optimize my listening experience. One song will end, another will begin and I kept on writing, maybe picking up a few sounds, maybe taking a second to nod my appreciation... But let's face it, it's background music. Vinyl makes you stop, makes you choose, it forces you to drop everything and think about what you want to hear. Even if it's background for other activities you at least had to give the slightest damn and some recognition of the sonic force coming out in stereo. And even after countless record plays, I still get that anticipatory giddiness of feeling the vinyl, seeing that iconic disc, and maneuvering that tone arm with some amount of practiced precision right before the room explodes into classic cacophony that no matter how times I've played it, still seems freshly exhilarating. Comments [post a comment]Comments are closed |
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