Spinning The Black Circle
If you’re a regular to my articles, then I’m assuming you probably envision me as some snobby musician type who’s really into vinyl “cause it just sounds better.”
AND YOU’D BE GOD-DIDDLY-DAMN RIGHT!
No medium has changed formats over the decades as quickly or drastically as music. I guess you could argue film, but for the sake of this we’re gonna ignore it, kay?
Vinyl, 8-Track, cassette, CD and of course our beloved digital streaming services. In less than one hundred years we went from the most popular format being a rubber disc that would melt in the sun, to an application in a device that fits in our pocket.
And yet, we have regressed!
Within the last decade, the resurgence in vinyl and cassette has been astounding. CD has managed to stick round, never really dying out but never being the giant it once was, but vinyl has come back kicking and screaming.
And why is that?
Why do so many of us have nostalgia for a format we were never around for?
Are we just alt losers who think we’re so deep and meaningful cause our copy of Ohms is on a gold vinyl disc? (My copy is on a gold disc, suck it.)
Do we TRULY believe that it sounds better?
Are we trying to evade the gaze of megacorps who wanna steal our data, know everything we are listening to at all hours and then shame us with their “spotify wrapped”, which reveals to you and your friends that maybe you like Korn a little tooooo much and at one point it was ironic but now you’re in too deep and can imitate the song Twist perfectly?
Spinning The Black Circle
“Oh yeah well I have the The Smiths picture disc so eat my shorts” – every alt kid in high school ever.
My first ever vinyl was a copy of Magical Mystery Tour by the Beatles. I’ll never forget the day I got it, starting my collection officially. You’d think it would be for sentimental reasons that I wouldn’t forget it, but it’s mostly that the night I first listened to it my mum made fun of my friends and I for the way we handled it. The idea of her son and his mates being so overly cautious and gentle with a vinyl record, something she grew up with, was hilarious. To her its just a vinyl, but to sixteen-year-old kids in 2016 it was a mystical artifact from before anyone had heard of a Spotify, iTunes or YouTube to MP3. Watching that archaic thing spin right round baby right round, like a record baby, right round round round was… mesmerizing.
That first listen set a trend for myself, one that I’ve found hard to shake, that being handling my records with nothing but painfully gentle care.
Removal from the case, to setting down on the turntable, all the way back to putting it away, it’s all a grueling experience of trying not to touch anything that could scratch the disc or get any grubby fingerprints on the etchings. It’s almost ritualistic, and for that reason I do not listen to vinyl as often as I would like. Streaming services might lose the physical aspects of music, but they also lose the whole experience of setting up an album. Good cause it means no spooky scary “will I damage my record from using it this one time”, bad cause no dope packaging.
What I’m trying to get at is this: vinyl is fun but if you scratch that thing then that’s forty to eighty bucks down the drain right then and there. As a student who is very much a material gorl, collecting physical media is something I thoroughly enjoy, and knowing that one misplaced fingerprint or accidental dropping of a slipcase could destroy a record gives me so much anxiety that vinyl has become a purely collectors medium rather than a listening one for me.
Look at me perpetuating the vinyl snob stereotype out here, Mr “I only collect it”.
But to be honest, in the age of streaming why would we listen to anything other than Spotify? The only reasons I can think of are sound quality and novelty of having to do a side change. But, once again to be honest does it really sound better? We (people who listen to vinyl) all claim that it does, but are we just saying that as a superiority thing or does it genuinely sound better?
Pure convenience in cost and timesaving is starting to leave physical music by the wayside. What’s the point in going to a store and buying an album, or shipping it to your home when you could simply load up a music app and stream it directly to a speaker? Long as your internet is stable, that’s uninterrupted music at the push of a button. And for only a few bucks a month you can download what you listen to, having hundreds of albums at your fingertips for the price of a pie and coke, as opposed to a single disc with an hour of music spanning a flip from A to B.
But I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – vinyl is an experience that you can’t get with digital downloads and streaming! There’s so much novelty in the amount of care, the absolute wankery of getting a disc out like a snobby artiste type, dropping a needle down onto it and then prattling off about how “superior the quality is”.
In conclusion, vinyl and basically any physical music media turns us listeners into pretentious hipsters.
And the day Spotify gains the ability to do that, I’ll cook and eat my original pressing of Plastic Surgery Disasters by Dead Kennedys, with The Wall by Pink Floyd for dessert.