HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE VINYL RECORD IN THE DIGITAL AGE [2019]

Spoken as an English sentence, “We should start paying more attention to music,” sounds rather banal. But five or six summers ago, at the apotheosis of my high-school senioritis, my best friend told me just that. With too much time on our hands, enrolled in a system of education which placed little to no premium on intellectual curiosity, we soon traded the comfort of weekends at home for weekends in the recesses of London’s avant-garde. The idea was to challenge ourselves. We drew out a chart, labelling different genres of music of which we had heard much, but never had a substantive chance or desire to explore. We both did this individually to see what the unspoken common ground would be, and to narrow down the list to a manageable size. My list included: Jazz, Blues, Soul, Disco, Funk, Techno, House, Afro-Beat, Dancehall and Apocalyptic Bass Music. The most overlap pertained to Disco1 and House. The syllabus was enshrined, and after some basic, superficial twenty-first-century student research involving Wikipedia and Google, our education could begin.

Boots on the the ground seemed like the best way to fully immerse ourselves. We could do as much arm-chair scrolling as we liked, but my friend’s Dad’s record collection quickly became a curious fascination. The cardboard boxes sat forlornly, dust-covered and neglected in that secret cupboard that all families use as permanent storage for things that are not of immediate importance in daily-life. There were perhaps eighty records, spanning forty years, starting in roughly 1950. On weeknights we’d enter the room and catalog the collection. My first interaction with analog recording–with the vinyl record–was visual. I had never seen such elaborate album artwork, such meticulous attention paid to the entire packaging of a product. Lyrics were on the back along with descriptions, testimonials, and little gems of popular culture aphorisms. For example, the back of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, contains a stipulation underneath the technical details of the record that it is TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME. This minute detail entrapped us both. All of these records were sold as a packaged experience designed to not only bathe your walls in sound, but also to adorn your homes, to interact with you physically. Music had been a purely auditory phenomenon up to that point, but now I felt the tactile magnetism of removing a shiny twelve-inch disk from the sleeve and examining its grooves with my index finger. This was a completely different experience to the callous indifference of streaming, of depressing a non-existent touch screen button to generate sound. This physical interaction with music was almost carnal, deeply tangible and authentically real. All of this came before the melody, before the rustle of crackling and popping as needle touches wax; a sound which has in recent years come to typify my personal soundscape.

When I crossed the threshold of my first record store I swear I could smell the technology. Musky, sort of dry and mothy. Like your grandparent’s basement on a relatively hot day. The sight came next: wooden crates ordered evenly on top of tables, the colors of the different record sleeves creating rectangular rainbows on the inside. In this establishment (as I would later find is not universally the case with record stores) everything was neatly ordered, each row of boxes contained a different genre; human expression neatly curated, there to touch and select at your aesthetic whim. We bought five records each, a cheap turntable, and some speakers.

At this point I was reminded of a previous moment in my life where I had discovered something new about the world, without fully expecting or anticipating it. Human excrement had long been a substance of intrigue during my younger years. Maybe it was the plethora of smutty jokes which it sanctioned, or perhaps the notion that shit is the great leveler of human intelligence and progress because, after all, everybody poops. But on a frosty February morning, at the tender age of twelve, it changed the way I saw the world. I hated modern art back then; to me, it was nothing more than a jumble of paint on canvas that any self-respecting four-year-old could produce. Notwithstanding, I unwillingly found myself in my Mother’s shadow inside the Gagosian Gallery. Everything was going to plan; I kept my head down, and didn’t ask any questions. I was plotting my escape. There was an art historian leading our tour named Ben, a man whose name I don’t think I’ll ever forget. He started to talk about a small metal tin that was quietly perched atop a plinth in the middle of the gallery: “Artist’s Shit” by Piero Manzoni. The artist had purportedly relieved himself into a tin can in 1961, sealed it, and then proceeded to sell it at the cost of its weight in gold. Like the smell of the record store and the satisfaction of that first purchase, I felt parts of me beginning to click. The idea, the abstract notion of what this was trying to express floated to the front of my brain. This was most important, the canvas, photo or sculpture merely the physical manifestation of the human imagination. Art had been a regular annoyance. In an instant an entire path of my life opened up, one which would follow a discipline that had always been ubiquitous, but never before appreciated. The way I saw art, in that moment, became my new way of seeing. I was limited by nothing, open to all possibilities and committed to understanding and interpreting something which, at first, might have seemed incomprehensible or obscure.

When we got home, I heard the sound of friction on polyvinyl chloride for the first time. It sounded warm, softer than the tones which I was used to hearing inside my headphones or over a digital speaker. There was the irregularity of it all, all that popping and crackling, all of those imperfections which have been aseptically scrubbed from modern music. And the sight of it was glorious in combination with the knowledge that friction alone was coloring this moment, this room, pumping out the sounds representative of a culture, of a worldview. From here my pedestrian stroll into the world of vinyl records turned into a marathon. My friend and I sought to maximize our collection. We expanded our circumference of exploration, and began to experience another intangible intrigue associated with the purchase of records: the record store.

As a breed these stores are in various different states of assembly. Some are remarkably organized and cataloged to cater to the recent boom in vinyl collection, whilst others remain messy and abstruse. The few are enjoying renaissances, but the many are slipping into obscurity in vogue with the flat-lining of the wider record manufacturing community. But one thing all stores have in common is a sense of fraternity, comradery and a commitment to open dialogue. Indeed, the culture surrounding records, specifically Disco and House2 (given the overlap of interest with my friend which prompted our foray into vinyl) has had an impact on the kinds of people I open myself up to meet, and more importantly, the musical avenues I have chosen to explore since my enlightenment. Less narcissistically, I’ve come to view modern popular music as shameless and highly effective in its ability to appropriate, marketize, and disseminate the sounds of race, the music of marginalized people. From its inception in the mid 20th century, popular music has been comprised primarily of noises which had their origins in places far from the mainstream. From blues to jazz, disco to house, corporate interests across the last century have been able to cherry-pick certain beats, certain musical notions, and re-contextualize them for a wider, more deep-pocketed audience. In doing so, messages of incredible strife and immense meaning have been lost in the sunny melodies of pop hits. Droves of loyal followers seeking the simple pleasure of transcendence have watched as their unique sounds have been transported–some may even say nakedly stolen–from their origins. Why does this happen? Why does so much popular music of today, and of the past forty years in general, have deep and obvious ties to some of the poorest, most neglected parts of America? Is it that wealthier, more materially comfortable citizens see part of themselves in this music based on strife, struggle, and situational-transcendence to which they listen? Or is it the precise opposite, namely that the well-off look to the other side of town for a sense of purpose and meaning for their otherwise vapid and mundane lives? Moreover, at what point do we draw the line between an interest in another's way of life and outright appropriation–that is–stealing? How can we better balance the scales so that interests align, so that the mainstream can experience something new, novel, and intriguing whilst contemporaneously returning value to those who brought it into existence in the first place?

THE WORLD JUST DOESN’T END THAT OFTEN [2020] The most appreciated aspect of the apocalypse to materially relevant Western capitalists of the right now is the vertiginous efforts brands have undertaken to give away their material for free.

For a society that so rarely experiences the elusive free lunch, Americans have been treated in recent weeks to a bountiful, hypodermically delivered internet harvest.

It’s worth noting, though, that the altruism of corporate America in the “internet age” seems only to really circumscribe services. What about goods? In other words, those pesky physical things we actually need to eke out an existence—you know, Maslow and all of that. To be clear, I’m glad that those of us who have an abundance of time on our hands (that means you, my fellow Knowledge Worker) can now entertain ourselves endlessly. Even though, to be honest, we were managing that just fine before the end of the world as we knew it.

My point is that, in mid-April 2020, as the virus appears to have been wrangled—hopefully— from a public health perspective, it’s probably time to seriously look beyond the freebies.

But what’s simply terrifying is that the nominal decline in our economy over the past six weeks has been largely mirrored by a nominal response. Sure, a lot of us got checks deposited virtually. But a lot of us didn’t. More of us lost jobs. I shudder to envision an America at 30% unemployment. An America that, because we’ll probably never shake hands again, can no longer rely on the rain or shine industriousness that so typifies the vibrancy of the small businesses that comprise around ninety-nine percent of our economy.

This doesn’t mean that brands should suddenly become overnight what they’re not. It isn’t incumbent on Disney to save the world; their remit is to entertain it.

Hope is always important. It’s just that when we’re on such unsure footing, it helps to have someone leading who actually might, maybe, possibly, know the way.

In the meantime, I’m headed to Supreme.com—they’re selling box logo T-Shirts.