photo by Rose Donlon
Back To The Future
vinyl albums make a comeback
PrintIn the introduction to the “cerebral” side of his 1972 double LP “Something/Anything?,” Todd Rundgren greets listeners with a tongue-in-cheek paean—now quietly quaint—to the gramophone record:
“Before we go any further, I’d like to show you all a game I made up. This game is called ‘Sounds of the Studio,’ and it can be played with any record, including this one. You can play it with, uh, you can even play it with your favorite record—you may be surprised! ... [Hissing] Now I’m sure you all recognize this. This is called hiss. It comes on, uh, records that were mastered lousy or, uh, mono- reprocessed for stereo, or any number of things. [Humming] This, of course, is hum. [Popping] P’s popping. And here’s what happens when the machine gains control and mangles your tape. [skips and clips] Punch. Outs.”
Ah, vinyl. Is Todd Rundgren inadvertently showing us how hopelessly outdated that medium is? His references to the format’s limitations and idiosyncrasies would never trouble the minds of today’s audiophiles, who buy music just by clicking a button.
With the advent of the CD in the 1980s, and the digital music industry afterwards, one might assume that the old phonograph disc has simply gone the way of the dodo. The statistics are grim: vinyl record sales, from a peak share of almost 100 percent of the music market, declined to less than a 5-percent portion by 1990.
But not all modern musicians have jumped ship. The Stone Roses, part of the Manchester 1960s-revival movement of the late 1980s, sung about the excitement when “the needle hit the groove.” Pearl Jam, godfathers of the subsequent grunge craze, still exhorts listeners to “spin the black circle.” Radiohead offered a vinyl edition of its latest album, “In Rainbows,” which has sold over 100,000 copies. Bands from Fleet Foxes to Beck to Portishead have also released vinyl copies of their albums.
Older groups, too, see potential in the old format. Legendary hard rock acts Guns N’ Roses and Metallica recently sold well with phonograph LPs. Elvis Costello initially offered his 2006 reissue of “The Juliet Letters” only as a vinyl record. Even U2, a band somewhat notorious for bustling to keep up with new trends, stubbornly offers its latest opus, “No Line on The Horizon,” in a turntable-friendly form.
And while the gramophone album will never dominate the charts as it did before, it has begun to make a comeback. According to Nielsen Soundscan, vinyl sales doubled in 2008, after increasing by 14 percent from 2006-2007. The new figures are the highest since 1991.
Why the increase? Rachel Mersky, a Barnard junior, is a younger fan of the older format. She says that listening to records changes her experience of music: “I listen to vinyl because it can play louder than my computer can, because it actually forces me to listen to an album how it was designed to be listened to—in order. And there’s this sort of nostalgia I think many people our age have for a time we didn’t even get to experience.”
Vinyl-oriented design marks albums from previous eras. Around the same time that Rundgren was teasing his audience, David Bowie was perplexing them on his “Diamond Dogs” album not only with a jumbled dystopian storyline—which still shines even on CD—but also with a track called “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family” that ends with an insistent shout intended to last as long as the listener lets the needle spin in the record’s final groove. For vinyl listeners, the possibilities are endless. For others, the ride lasts approximately 35 seconds.
Many vinyl aficionados also favor the format for its clearer, sharper sound quality. Bob Abramson, who has run his House of Oldies store on Carmine Street since the heyday of Hendrix, is one of these aficionados, and a vocal one at that. “Nothing can compete with vinyl. It sounds much better. No challenge at all,” he says.
Mersky appreciates the sound as well, saying, “There’s something about the scratches and imperfections that is charming. There’s something really charming and exciting about the tactility of putting an album on.”
The feel of a vinyl record, weighty and silky, is intoxicating in itself. Every act, from removing the disc from its sleeve to applying the needle to the groove, literally connects the listener to the music. And MP3s will never compete with old records in hypnotics: “Desolation Row” becomes more mesmerizing and immersing than it already is when every whining harmonica blast and frank guitar strum is accompanied by another revolution of the circle. The sound, so intimate and personal, stands in stark contrast to the hyper-compressed music on those downloading sites.
The cost and convenience of producing gramophone records, however, is impersonal. The format is unappealing to most companies, both due to vinyl’s decline and because the format calls for more expensive materials. Many businesses, however, still offer the medium of the past.
Perhaps the most positive indication for vinyl lovers of the format’s new ascendance is the fact that the upswing of vinyl sales is concomitant with a sharp decline of CD sales. When given a choice to buy music, people opt for either a physical copy—vinyl and CDs—or a nonphysical one, like MP3s. Already becoming outmatched by digital downloads, the CD now faces stiff competition from its old, resurgent rival, as people realize that the former’s sole advantage is size-related. And does size really matter when you’re just listening to the Shins in your dorm room?
5 November 2009
vol. 7, issue 8
More ARTS
No one wants to admit that they like playing video games.
Questioning Narrative Conventions
Jesse Ball's The Way Through Doors defies the strict classifications of genre—although it appears to be a novel, its dizzyingly complex narrative structure resembles poetry more than prose.
I didn’t consider running away from home until halfway through the third grade, when my mother bought me E.L. Konigsberg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Comments
We're looking for comments that are interesting and substantial. If your comments are excessively self-promotional, or obnoxious you will be banned from commenting. Consult the comment FAQ and legal terms.