There aren’t too many nails hipsters have hit squarely on the head, but one of them is vinyl.
I have been deeply committed to music - as a consumer, not as a producer - pretty much my entire life, and although my early years were centered around vinyl, it was out of necessity. That was pretty much all there was when I was a kid (except for the true freaks who traded reel-to-reel recordings.) And when CD’s came around I was a bright and early adopter; my vinyl quickly went into storage. Later still, when CD’s were replaced with digital tracks I was one of the first on the bandwagon again, and was only too happy to stick my billions of jewel cases into a closet somewhere, trading them for the convenience of an iPod, and later my phone. Now, like everyone else, I carry pretty much every song ever recorded around in my pocket, every minute of every day. They’re tucked in there with the entire collected knowledge of mankind, every item of today’s news, and countless videos of dogs riding skateboards. Want to hear R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe?” BAM! “Maybelline” by Chuck Berry? BOOM! T.S.O.L.’s cover of “All Along The Watchtower?” POW! The Fugees “Fu-Gee-La?” DONE!
Not bad. Hail blessed progress.
But something happened recently. I found my old vinyl.
Not all of it. Not all of it survived. But in one of the many boxes of stuff that I had shipped over from Northern Virginia to Spain when I moved here nearly six years ago now, I recently discovered a small cache of vinyl. Twenty five or thirty albums. A weird smattering of the old days. Squeeze. ZZ Top. The Alarm. The Smiths. R.E.M. The Mirrors. The Doors. The Police. The Kinks. All at least 30 years old. Some older. So I brought them to the shop, scootchied my beloved solid-state Marantz receiver over a little to one side and made room for a turntable, plugged it in and started playing. And… wow. Something clicked. Vinyl has been a revelation.
It isn’t the sound quality. People will go on and on about the “fullness of the sound” from vinyl, and I’m quite sure they’re right. It sounds great. But that’s not the font of my epiphany. No, for me it’s something else entirely. It’s the connection to the music. I forgot how cool it is to listen to LP's. It's the act of choosing a record and committing to it. Like… sitting down and listening to a series of songs assembled in a certain order by a certain band. Painstakingly thought-out and crafted into a physical thing that connects you to the music and the people who created it. Unlike “tracks,” listening to an LP doesn't encourage you to hop around and skip songs, or flip to something else in the spur of the moment. LP’s aren’t for the short-attention-span 21st century. No. They’re a forced throwback to the old days, when music was not consumed in thousands of bite-sized chunks, but savored, note by note, over the course of the better part of an hour. Once you go through the effort of cueing up an LP and dropping the needle, you're in, committed for the duration. And the “duration” you’re committed for is a story that is being told to you by the artist. It’s like sitting down and reading a book, chapter by chapter. An LP is a story that evolves and grows slowly, song by song. Some stories are better than others, of course, but you’re pretty much forced to consume it in the way, and at the pace, the artist intended.
That's lost. That’s gone. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the convenience of modern digital music, and I'm not a luddite or anything, but the production and dissemination of an album, created as a collection and distributed as a collection, by a band to your ears? Yeah, that's gone. And it's a real loss, I think.
So when I drive around in my car, I’ll still happily throw on Spotify or whatever. And when my kids ask me to play “Boulevard Of Broken Dream” by Green Day or “Californication” by the Chili Peppers, so they can sing their lungs out, I’ll grab my phone and make it happen. And that’s great. But when I get to work, and I’m sitting having coffee and doing morning paperwork, ordering parts, going though build sheets for vehicles, I’ll be dropping the needle on a story and consuming it in its entirety. The way the artist intended.
If you have the ability, give it a go. If you have a collection of LP’s somewhere, break ‘em out. I think you’ll find it really satisfying.