One likes to believe in the freedom of music.
Rush – Spirit of Radio.
Pictures from my youth. The family is gathered around the Christmas tree. It’s Christmas morning and wrapping paper is flying. A flat square, wrapped in red paper, gets passed across. There can be no mistaking what it is: a record. Twelve inches of vinyl that when rotated 33 1/3 times a minute with a needle stuck in it’s grooves, produced music. The question isn’t what is it? – although it is often asked with humour – but which record is it? The Christmas in question peeling back the wrapping paper produces a familiar red cover, with what looks like an impatient vulture, staring into the distance with it’s arms folded.
It must be twenty years between receiving an LP for Christmas, but the musical landscape is changing and this Christmas brought Them Crooked Vultures in all it’s double LP, gatefold cover glory. I reviewed the album via you tube download, when it first came out. If your interested in what I have to say about the music, that review still stands.
The bigger question is, why am I getting it on LP? How did it come to pass that 2009’s super group, Them Crooked Vultures, are releasing their inaugaural disc on vinyl? The answer, in my opinion, is two fold. LP records are back, and they came back because they make more sense as a keepsake in the era of MP3s, and because humbled record companies are, finally, giving their customers what they want.
To the latter point first. Records, or fans of the record, have never gone away. Always a substantial minority, CDs began to overcome records only after the record companies started restricting records. Up went the price, down went the supply and that’s a bingo, we live in a CD universe where the record companies profits double per unit sold and Yuppy morons were trading in their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack LPs and buying Phil Collin’s and Sting CDs. Soon the rest of us had no choice and, in the name of quality, we are buying our second copy of Born to Run, this time on CD sourced from the same LP we still have. Who voted for this business model?
Actually, no one voted for it because there never was a choice. Not for ten years or so anyway. But soon enough choice reared it’s ugly head in the name of Napster and in the form of MP3s. Suddenly there was another way to listen to music, and people voted for “not the CD.”
To be sure, CDs had their advantages, convenience being the main one. You could throw it in the CD player, play song 2,4,7 and 9 without having to hear the rest and without scratching your record or having to turn it over. It didn’t take long before you could program your CD player to play those songs, and soon after you could buy a CD player that holds 5 CDs, push on random and not have to hear the same song twice between dinner and the Tonight show. I was at many parties between 1988 and 1995 when the home stereo was turned into a muzak player, with a constant rotation of Sting, Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and The Eagles (if the hosts put as much thought into the selection of beer as they did music, I never made it to Sting song #2).
Eventually CD’s became portable. It took a while, but the hardware makers developed the Discman, and you could stick a CD player in your pocket and listen while in the line at the bank. You couldn’t move and listen to it without it skipping, but you could still take it with you. Eventually they solved for walking, even if running was still a problem. By the time portable CD players became obsolete, they had solved the running problem too.
They put CD players in cars too. In a list of life’s great mystery’s, one has to include the following: how do they get the Caramilk in the Caramilk bar? Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong? How come they had CD players that didn’t skip in cars by 1990 but you couldn’t do the Terry Fox run without your CD skipping until 2005? But they did it, they had CD players in cars. You could plunk it in and go. Buy that Spin Doctors CD and sadly discover that while you could listen to Two Princes from Milton to Niagara Falls, you would gladly stick knotting needles in your ear before you listened to any of the other songs on the CD again? No problem, just keep hitting the back button and you could repeat the same song over and over. Because it was CDs, and if the music they were putting on them was, on the whole, crap, the CDs themselves were a great convenience.
But the advantage of CDs ends with their convenience. The quality argument never really held water and even if CDs had superior quality, what MP3s prove is that people don’t care that much about the quality. It was good enough on record, and it’s still good enough on the far inferior MP3s.
And if we can stand the sound of MP3s, they’re extremely portable, can be got or purchased without leaving your bedroom, are available for free, although often not legally, and work regardless of whether you put them away properly. Soon came the MP3 player, and suddenly it’s never mind Terry Fox, you could do Jump Rope for Heart and not have your music skipping. You can program them, carry around hundreds of albums and literally thousands of songs. Five CDs playing a random selection of songs? Now you can DJ a wedding with nothing but a good amplifier, 2 good speakers and an I-pod – and never play the same artist twice. DJs used to show up in vans, now if the hall has a good in-house PA they show up on a Vespa and still have room for an assistant.
MP3s, however, don’t make for a good collectable. If you can have far better variety of music on hand at all times without causing a bulge in your pocket, CDs lose their convenience. But if you want to collect music, LPs have always been a better choice. Bigger covers mean that you can print who played keyboards on song #3, or the songs lyrics in a font bigger than that found on an Asprin bottle. And the new LPs are being made of more, and better quality vinyl, creating a quality of sound inarguably as good as anything you can get on a CD. They stack nice against a wall, and look good doing so, while the smaller yet bulkier CD take up more floor space. LPs also allow for cooler covers. Now you don’t have to have a close up shot of the singer, you can do some actual art.
LPs are back, made useful again because the advantages they always had over CDs still exist, the advantages CDs had over LPs are made redundant by MP3s. And the record companies, losing customers, power and money had no choice but to listen to what their customers demanded: 20 years too late perhaps, but finally they listen.
And finally, a new record under the Christmas tree. Yes Virginia, you can go home again.
The Freedom of Music, This Week on my I-Pod
Born to Run, CD, Celine Dion, LP, Mariah Carey, MP3, Phil Collins, Saturday Night Fever, Spin Doctors, Sting, The Eagles, Them Crooked Vultures, Two Princes
Last week at this time I mused on the subject of Lindsay Lohan, and what would 
I fill this space with if she stays out of trouble? I put the post to bed Friday night, put myself to bed, and by the time I woke up, Paris Hilton had answered my call:
Recent Comments