Rants and Raves
The Future of Music is the Past
Written by: Ed Butler
Published: Mar 9th '09
When I was about 10 years old, I bought my first album. I saved pocket money for about two months, and after denying myself many of the earthly pleasures that are of paramount importance to ten year-olds generally (read – sugar), I owned it. I walked out of Brashs (the now defunct record store) with my brand new copy of New Kids on the Block’s Hangin’ Tough. Not for me the personal historical revisionism so prevalent in music nerd circles of the ‘My first album was Marquee Moon’ variety – but more of that another day. It was, up to that point, the greatest moment of my life.
And it was vinyl. The old-fashioned black disc had not quite been usurped by the upstart CD as the dominant means of listening to music in 1991, and my family was unaware of any other form of music media, so a vinyl album it was. Nursing it onto the turntable was something akin to a religious experience, formative in its way. The feeling of reverence I held for that inanimate object is of far more importance to my present-day self than the sounds contained thereon.
Shortly after that purchase, slightly older and wiser, I resolved to be progressive. I switched to CDs. I bought The Badloves’ Get On Board as my first CD, aged 12. I had made the considered decision to stick with the times, and CDs were the future. Thoughts like these are relevant today, because now, CDs are the past. Today, vinyl is the future.
Yeah, you heard me. I bought a turntable, and it has been a revelation. The death of the CD and the associated rise of the MP3 have created a raft of wonderful things that make listening to music better and easier. Portability, flexibility and simplicity are all hallmarks of the iPod era. But it has robbed recorded music of its heft. It is no longer an event to listen to a song, or an album. Gone is the anticipation of the purchase of new music. There is no event in buying a bunch of files from iTunes, no sensation of holding music in your hands, no booklet to obsessively leaf through. Just point and click.
Compare that with the experience, the glorious, visceral experience, that goes with listening to a vinyl record. The very nature of the medium commands respect, even reverence. It is delicate, ungainly and it insists you handle it with care, carefully blow away the dust. The needle then dropped onto the groove and there's that noise – that most wonderful, recognizable sound. The crackle of needle scraping along the surface of an LP is universal – a sound so synonymous with music that once the shift was made to CD, many bands still insisted on putting it on their albums to add some character.
Then, you can’t skip tracks. You can’t create playlists. You can’t hit shuffle. You must sit back, ease into a comfortable chair, and listen to the album as its creators intended. Once more, music can be an experience. Something to be shared, or to be internalized as the listener sees fit. Not something to be consumed alone, earbuds inserted, blocking the world out. It is the antithesis of music on the train, hundreds of people closed off from society, music as an anti-communal experience. Here, music being created by the amplification of physical interaction between two bodies, it becomes almost a corporeal thing, a thing of substance.
So I say to you, dear reader, get out and buy a turntable. A cheap one. Go to a second hand music shop, or a garage sale, and pick up discarded Crosby, Stills and Nash records. Place the needle on the groove. Sit back, and drift away. Go back to the future. You will rediscover what it is you loved about music as a kid.
