Week 47: The Death of Vinyl?

I spent the last couple of weeks relaxing in Puerto Rico and Florida. Had a nice time with the family, saw old friends, took the baby swimming, etc etc. Thank you Rosa, Bloody Jumpsuit, and Head Stapler for covering the posts.

The trip was great for clearing the mind and getting some inspiration to write about a few things, but before I do, I have to bring up something I unexpectedly discovered while looking for turntables.

You know how some people think that all those dead rock and roll idols aren’t really dead? One of the most harebrained theories from people with that belief claims that they all faked their own death, and are now living together in a secret paradise, maybe somewhere in the South Pacific, enjoying in complete anonymity all the money and earthly pleasures that their fame and popularity can afford them.

They are served day and night by teams of dumb, deaf and blind groupies that attend to their every need. And at night they get together and listen to each others recordings. But the recordings they use are not plain old CDs or MP3s or 8-tracks, they are albums, but not your good old black vinyl type, what they play are gold and platinum records. Not the ones the RIAA awards you for certain number of albums sold. No, these ones are made of real 100% solid gold or platinum, and are actually playable. So all night long they listen to these gold and platinum records and it is said that when they hear their own music played in this format they experience instantaneous and endless orgasms that Sting couldn't even begin to imagine.

I always thought this was all a big whatever. I mean who cares about whether these dead rock stars are dead or not, and even less about what they do if they were actually alive and living in some paradise-like island? But my attitude changed while searching to buy a new turntable so i could play the crappy, scratchy vinyl that I so adore. I found an online store, The Needle Doctor, that I can only conclude is a front for a secret message to the living rock stars of today. I'm far from a rock star, but years of acting like an idiot on stage, and excessive amounts of drugs have given me the ability to understand the secret semiotics of the rock star language. And when I found this online store, what I saw was not just a fancy turntable store, but a secret message that said, If you make endless amounts of money, are willing to spend it on completely useless stuff, and are willing to pretend to be dead so you can use this completely useless stuff without anyone bothering you so that you are be able to listen to your own recordings as printed unto legendary gold and platinum records that give you instantaneous and endless orgasms upon hearing them, then you have come to the right place. Frankly I'm surprised Sting and Bono are still pretending to be alive.

I love my vinyl. I'm not sure exactly why. A pretending-to-be-clever me might say that it has something to do with the sound quality being warmer, more human, but I think that statement is too general and makes it sound as if I was saying the recording quality was better. To tell you the truth I'm not absolutely sure I would pass a blind test between hearing a digital recording and a "perfectly" clean vinyl recording. But I do know that I do love my vinyl. Digital stuff is like frozen music, captured in time and forever frozen in the medium. Digital is also too damn easy, it really has no personality and you don't even have to take it to dinner before it puts out.

Not vinyl. My vinyl ages with me. New pops and crackles mysteriously appear as if the vinyl had been out on a night of heavy drinking without me. My vinyl also makes me work for it's music. Not only do I have to be careful with it or it might scratch, scarring it forever, but there is no remote control so I have to get up and manually pull the record from it's multiple sleeves, being careful not to leave my hand print on the surface. It's a whole process dealing with vinyl before you get to the music. To me digital music reminds me of my friend who had a dog, but always had other people walking it, bathing it, feeding it, etc, all he ever did was pet the poor animal. You ever have to clean an MP3? Often enough (more often than not) I'm lazy and listen to the digital music in my computer, but I will never develop the kind of affection for it that I have for my vinyl, I don't care how crappy and scratchy it gets.

So after discovering this online store, I realized that vinyl is not just a medium of the past, but it is slowly being dragged away from us, the struggling vinyl buyers, by these pretend-dead rock stars and some sort of trilateral commission of recording technology in order to keep me from listening to the sweet sound of my vinyl records.

I’ve lived my life with the belief that humans can’t keep secrets. So how is it that a secret this important has never made it to the news, or at least some online blog? The realization that secrets like this could be kept has sent my mind into a 78rpm spin, and in my fevered spinning mind I had a vision. In that vision vinyl records were being made exclusively of gold and platinum, they cost thousands of dollars to buy and only a very few people in the world could afford them, and even if a very clever burglar managed to steal an album from one of the ultra wealthy, the burglar would still not be able to play that record since the only equipment available to play them were machines the size of skyscrapers with spinning plates hidden in their very center inside plutonium vaults that were only reachable through complex labyrinths that required one to answer correctly thousands of standardized test questions along with millions of entertainment trivia questions before you could get through. At this point I came to from my vision and found myself in a cold sweat only to realize it had all been a dream and i still had my trusty turntable that could spin my crappy and scratchy vinyl. But for how long?

Ok, I'm sure you want to see the secret symbols in this Needle Doctor store that have driven me to such fevered visions. Well, here's some of it, you tell me if you don't get the same message I got.

Check out the turntable. What records do you think are being played on this?

Here’s the cartridge for it. More than twice the price of my car.

And of course you do have to keep those records clean, so you'll need this record cleaner.

And of course a preamp is absolutely necessary. Don't ask me why.

I know, I know. If you are like me, you are in shock, and like me you must be thinking, how much longer will it be before I can no longer afford a needle for my turntable, and then you are wondering if you will be able to build your own turntable from a bicycle, which of course leads to all kind of theories about how to make copies of your vinyl records by melting old tires.

Once the shock subsides though, you’ll realize that the vinyl war is far from over and that there are still affordable turntables out there, and that there are still bands like the Linus Pauling Quartet that are releasing their records on vinyl at an affordable price and not on gold or platinum (thank you LP4). So go buy their record, and buy other newly released vinyl records.

And buy a cheap turntable. This one is not only inexpensive but portable so you can take it with you when the pretend-dead rock stars have taken over the habitable parts of the world to build their monstrous turntables so they can play their gold and platinum records and fill the world with their cum. Me, I'll be in some underground cave, pedal-cranking my bicycle turntable so I can listen to my crappy scratchy vinyl made from melted tires.

PS - This week I wont submit any music for the week's podcast cause this is all about vinyl and the podcast doesn't do vinyl. So to the podcast creator, my suggestion is to allow for a few minutes of silence somewhere in the middle of the podcast, maybe 4-5 minutes. During this time if you want to hear my submission you will have to get up and manually go to your turntable and play any vinyl you can find. How hard is that?

*The image above is of the Voyager Golden Record that was sent up on the two Voyager spaceships in 1977.