needles

as i drink a scotch and eat a bowl of cheerios i figure i should introduce myself. but i already have, i suppose, as i've already contributed to this space without acknowledging that it just might confuse the hell out of everybody. so i skipped a step. sue me.

i don't necessarily know what i'm going to be when i grow up (if i haven't grown up already), but i have some options. those options include longshoreman, "writer," unemployed, and most recently, dj. the needles i refer to aren't the bad kind, the kind that give everybody either the willies or the DTs, but the kind that bring sweet sweet music to your ears.

i had a revelation yesterday: vinyl ain't that great. sure it's a portal to another time, where music wasn't as easy to get as a quick keystroke and a few minutes of patience as your newest obsession downloads, where you can get an album a full six weeks before the artist (or more likely, the label) intended you to. back when hours were spend flipping through bins in a musty record (record. vinyl's the reason that word has meaning) store, praying you get lucky and finally find that 12" that's been eluding you for a good month, but just has to show up sometime. that was a great time, one that i wasn't even alive for, but i can still appreciate. but the real question: does it sound better?

everyone's answer is yes. i always said yes. until i was asked if anyone i knew had a cassette deck. we all have cassettes collecting dust from the early 90s, when we bought MC Hammer, the Space Jam soundtrack, and every edition of Jock Jams we could get our hands on, and played those cassettes until they wore right through and we had to get another one. but where are they now? not being played, that's for sure. but if the history of vinyl says anything about music, it's that the medium is influenced both in the artistic sense and the physical sense. there's a certain impersonality to clicking a wheel on an ipod and playing that b-side it took you 12 seconds to find on a blog somewhere, compared to the relative "warmness" of slipping a record out of its sleeve, blowing off the dust and setting the needle just so, the familiar crackle of the blank space before the album kicks in reassuring you that you've at least done something right. there's just no challenge. and maybe that's what we're clinging to. there's still, even now, perhaps even intensified in the instant gratification age, a sense of the hipster one-upmanship of finding that track, bootleg, remix that nobody else has (yet). but imagine a time when search engines didn't exist, where album leaks were actually a big deal, not just expected collateral damage.

so what is it i'm trying to say? vinyl gets a wrap it doesn't necessarily deserve. it sounds good, sure, with the right speakers, but so does anything else. the vinyl effect can even be recreated in a studio these days. basically, who's to say that in 30 years the future-hipsters won't be collecting cassettes, making literal "mix-tapes" in an effort to be retro, cool, hip, ironically "cutting-edge." "man, music just doesn't sound like it used to," the kids'll say, "cassettes just sound better than having it beamed into your head" (which is what my limited imagination tells me is how music will be received in the future). but then everything changed for me.

james murphy, of lcd soundsystem extraordinaire, still spins the vinyl every now and then, and i had the privilege of standing 30 inches away from him as he did tonight. watching the man work, the pure physicality involved, sans computers, sequencers, or anything that might make it slightly less "real," made me appreciate the format of vinyl in a way i hadn't before. it wasn't the sound (which was pounding, in a good way), it was the performance. but as mr. murphy himself has said, purposefully oxymoronic, "i hear you're buying a synthesizer, and an arpeggiator, and throwing your computer out the window, because you want to make something 'real'. you wanna make a Yaz record." the quotes around 'real' are mine, but i imagine that's what he intended. sure, spinning is still technology, but it ain't the easy kind of technology. and that somehow makes it all better.

vinyl's not bad. it's really great actually. but the hype it gets just might come from that hipster ethos, the thought that if i like something that everybody else sorta hates, or at least writes off or has forgotten about, and i stick to my guns, i just might appear ironically avant-garde. and avant-garde is cool, especially when it's ironic. all i know is i danced till my legs wanted to die tonight. it probably wasn't the vinyl that made me do it, more like the disco grooves that are currently making my ears ring as i finish up my scotch and get ready to pass out. but i had a great fucking time nonetheless.

so that's me. nice to meet ya. (again)

--mc-danced-out.