Final Vinyl
Dear Audiophile/Retro Child/Dude Who Can't Grow Old Gracefully,
I know you think you know what you're doing but you're horribly misguided. You're of the noble persuasion that the re-discovery, nay the
rebirth, of the LP is essentially the return of the king. You love the LP's "warm" sound; you love albums being presented to the public in the most highly-aesthetic, artistic form; or you simply have a thing for liner notes. But it's ill-conceived and it's bound to fail. Give it up.
Yeah I know, every single musical source is trumpeting the return of the album.
Spin and
RollingStone and
Paste are all marvelling at the return of the old, smoky favourite. This antiquated format, left for dead in the mid-eighties and many more times since, is making huge inroads with the youth of today, and the audiophile of yesteryear and with anyone else who's literally willing
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Final Vinyl
Dear Audiophile/Retro Child/Dude Who Can't Grow Old Gracefully,
I know you think you know what you're doing but you're horribly misguided. You're of the noble persuasion that the re-discovery, nay the rebirth, of the LP is essentially the return of the king. You love the LP's "warm" sound; you love albums being presented to the public in the most highly-aesthetic, artistic form; or you simply have a thing for liner notes. But it's ill-conceived and it's bound to fail. Give it up.
Yeah I know, every single musical source is trumpeting the return of the album. Spin and RollingStone and Paste are all marvelling at the return of the old, smoky favourite. This antiquated format, left for dead in the mid-eighties and many more times since, is making huge inroads with the youth of today, and the audiophile of yesteryear and with anyone else who's literally willing to listen.
There are four archetypes driving this renaissance: Retro Kid; the Jaded Hippie; the Stubborn Musician and the lastly, The Label.
Of the four, The Label's reasons are the least profound and most transparent. A record company will sell you a bean tied to a stick if you told them it sounded better, and said you'd be willing to pay for it. Formats, to a label, are what handkerchiefs are to a suit - an afterthought.
The Jaded Hippie's credo is always about the past always being superior to the future. Life reached a pinnacle during his existence and curiously both the world and the Jaded Hippie hit it at exactly the same moment. Jaded Hippie was just smart enough to have poured his entire life into a storied record collection, something he constantly reminds you about while either sneering at the latest Arcade Fire CD or by repeating the liner notes, verbatim, from every Grateful Dead album, Aoxomoxoa through Shakedown Street.
The Hippie will tell you about that time in which, for one brief stretch, music and life joined hands and hugged the world. The album is the beaming child of this incredible relationship, the product of this ethereal marriage. Nothing builds a bond with an inanimate object quite like hazy memories of momentous drug binging and confused, anonymous sex.
And the Stubborn Musician - sometimes synonymous with the Jaded Hippie - hates anything he perceives to be poisoning his music. Only in the cute cuddliness of an album can one hear the lissom nuances of his music; the drummer missing the high-hat on the downbeat; the lead guitarist breaking another string. Digital audio could never acoustically capture the bass player wiping his nose during the chorus.
The Stubborn Musician and The Label will always remain diametrically-opposed. They are natural enemies, sworn to hate each other sometime between Mozart's Fourth and Bon Jovi's tenth. The album is but another of the fabled weapons in this eternal war - another brick in The Wall if you will. If Apple presented U2 with a replicated holograph of The Joshua Tree, Bono would say he sounds nasally.
But the biggest proponent of the LP's resurrection is Retro Kid. He is Atari. He is The Brady Bunch Movie. He is the reason Tom Jones refuses to die. The Retro Kid lives by the simple principle that cool died years before he was born. He fills his mind with fantastic visions of what the sixties and the seventies and the eighties were. Huey Lewis was just a misunderstood genius.
Retro Kid lacks a credible viewpoint to base his aural opinion on. If Jack White says mp3s turn his music into a pinball machine's soundtrack then Retro Kid believes it. If enough Retro Kids want wax, then wax is what we get.
And that's exactly the inane movement we're caught up in right now. It's not that there can't be a discernible difference in the sound of an LP, it's just that very few can actually detect it. It's not there isn't some sense in paying homage to a bygone format but they're missing the whole point as to why the format is in the bygone era bin to begin with. Albums still have that one fatal flaw that foretold their ultimate demise in the first place, and that's their fallibility.
They're made from petroleum - yes kids, purchase an LP and it sounds like you're inadvertently supporting the War in Iraq - and they can be done in by any one of the following: heat, hand pressure, bending, static, extreme cold and/or a fly sneezing. Superman has his kryptonite and the LP is easily destroyed by anyone not wearing surgical gloves, dressed in negatively-charged clothing, living in a zero-gravity, humidity-controlled room. If, rather when the unthinkable but highly-predictable happens and the album suffers that first fatal scratch, you will notice two major audio hiccups. First, the needle will thump loudly anytime it hits the aforementioned scratch and scare the bejeezus out of both you and the cat. And second, the record will routinely skip each and every time it hits that spot causing an annoying repeat of what you just heard, causing an annoying repeat of what you just heard, causing an annoying repeat of what you just heard.
LPs died because they were supposed to die. It's called progress. Science has saved us before and, at some point, will save us again. They gave us the paper clip, they will acoustically-rescue music from the damned heartless cyborgs that apparently control its production now.
Science promises you endless liner notes and laser 3D holograms as album covers, and eventually, music so aesthetically-pure Stevie Wonder will think someone just broke into his house. The longer you spend hanging onto great grandpa in his sonic deathbed the longer it will take us to reach those beautifully fabulous days.
Keep your records. Tell your kids about the halcyon days when you smoked some weed while burning holes into Frampton Comes Alive. Wax poetic (yeah, I know) all you want, but let it die. Please.
Signed,
Been There (the first time)
