Needle point/counter point
Via Metafilter, I found an interesting pair of articles, one claiming that vinyl is dead, the other claiming that it ain’t going anywhere.
As someone with 4,000 records that I’ve dragged from apartment to apartment, and for which I eventually had to make a giant hutch in my den (okay, it holds my TV, too, but I just can’t bring myself to admit that I own a custom-made “entertainment unit”), I’m interested in the whole debate from an emotional standpoint, since, as even the guy who argues in support of vinyl admits that it’s, er, a little impractical in the iPod era.
Where he ends up, I think, is spot-on. Vinyl has what you might call a presence. If I were a pretentious ass, I might point you to Walter Benjamin’s seminal piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. But you know, Bloggerton is way too street for that bookish nonsense. I’m keepin’ it real.
The reason I might have thought of Benjamin (but only if I were a pretentious ass, mind you) is that he suggests that paintings, as opposed to photos, had an aura. (Ironically, of course, that’s shifted a bit, because in the Flickr era, photos have an aura. The difference between holding an old photo of your dad, on the one hand, and zapping the same photo up to Flickr is a pretty big one, I think.)
Vinyl has an aura. MP3s, not so much.
For myself, there’s naturally a place for both. That’s why I hope vinyl won’t die, even though I can’t remember the last time I actually bought one.
Anyway, I’ll shut it. How did this post end up being all crazy philisophical? Check out the articles. It’s a fun little debate.
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The exact same argument could be applied to film cameras vs. digital cameras. Film, in my opinion, will always have an aura that is different from a digital file. The thinking and technique behind shooting film is different from shooting digital, and therefore, I can’t see a death of film. There will always be a need to that *aura*.
Bah. Nonsense. I see your ‘aura’ and raise you one ‘digital signal processor’.
I come down on the other side. Whatever magical special properties you hear in a delivery mechanism always can be measured and duplicated.
That we often don’t bother to is a function of the number of people who are discerning/picky enough to bother looking for it; and they are quite happy with their vacuum tubes.
I think vinyl will always have a place – not because of the aural characteristics, but rather the relentlessly tactile nature of it. You can pick up a record, fling it around… but you can also scratch it, apply different needles to it. Its analog bumps.
Chemical film is an emulsion. Same principle applies.
I love it when a reply starts with “Bah. Nonsense.” It means, hopefully, that I’m not as boring as I thought.
The aura reference was aimed pretty squarely at the record’s tactile qualities, and its more basically physical ones. As he says in the article, a used record store is full of dead dreams. Maybe somebody sold that Streetheart record to pay for school. Or maybe they sold it for heroin.
Regardless, it’s an object, not a bunch of bits that some knot-head has mislabeled “Stuck in the Middle With You — Bob Dylan” and fired out, bellowing its idiocy (and his) on Limewire.
“It means, hopefully, that I’m not as boring as I thought.”
Actually, I was just going for pleasantly cranky belligerence.
“The aura reference was aimed pretty squarely at the record’s tactile qualities, and its more basically physical ones. As he says in the article, a used record store is full of dead dreams. Maybe somebody sold that Streetheart record to pay for school. Or maybe they sold it for heroin.”
I was referring to the actual reproduction of analog vs digital bits. I suppose that’s interesting that somebody maybe sold an old record for heroin, but I don’t see why having it come from a record, or a corporation, bestows an ‘aura’.
“Regardless, it’s an object, not a bunch of bits that some knot-head has mislabeled…”
So? These objects can be created at will now. So yes, knot-heads will tag them wrong. I see this as a good thing, on the whole. Bad data is irritating; cartels are worse.
Er yes, except that the data in question still comes from the cartels. What we have now is the same shit, created without good cover art or packaging, that boneheads can mislabel because, at a certain basic level, they just don’t care about it. That’s the price the industry has paid for prioritizing profit over all else. They’ve created more people who see the vast majority of popular music for precisely what it is: disposable, forgettable, unimportant marketing.
I’m not saying good music has to be on vinyl, or that loving vinyl isn’t, at some level, an irrational fetish. In fact, I think I’m saying, precisely, that the aura is an irrational fetish. And that’s what I like about it. If you can hold it in your hand, I truly believe that it bestows a more personal connection. Otherwise I’d trade in my cats for Neopets, which have the added benefit of not shitting in a box in my house.
And if a Neopet dies, I can just hit the web and score another one. And another one after that.
How far can you throw an mp3 file?
Can you run across a field with an MP3 in your buttcheeks?
Test