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Published
in Gulf News, August 15, 2006
Taking life
at 33.33rpm
I
was
going to attend a record fair for the first time and was burning
with curiosity. Would it be full of dusty old men in anoraks looking
for LPs of obscure Tchaikovsky concerts? What would be on sale and
would it all be fantastically cheap?
I was
banking on a good answer to the last question, because I certainly
wasn't going just to look. After seeing how cheap and easily available
records are here, both on eBay and at used stores, I have been slowly
building up a collection of vinyl. When I was discussing my first
LP purchase with my wife, the first thing she said was, "But
you don't have a record player."
"I'll
buy one."
"You'll
buy one? But don't have any records."
"Err…"
My
wife didn't really see why I was doing this, especially in an age
when many people find even loading a CD a waste of precious time
and energy. While vinyl never died out - living on in DJ and audiophile
circles - apparently it's making a slow mainstream comeback.
This
is heartening because the MP3 boom has gone too far. The only thing
people talk about is how their players hold four billion songs and
that their computers have four billion more. Nobody seems to discuss
quality anymore. It's all about being able to flex a thumb over
a shiny MP3 player and issue a challenge: "Name a song. Any
song."
Forget
about vinyl; I know several young and not-so-young people who think
it terribly old-fashioned to buy CD's. Not only do they seem to
be against music that occupies physical space, they insist they
don't have the ears to tell the difference between different mediums.
One person, after finding out that I preferred CD's to MP3's, even
asked if I'd had my hearing checked; suggesting that I responded
to certain frequencies that CD emphasised. But this argument puts
little faith in the complexity of our senses, intertwined as they
are with emotions, memories and plain "feel". A well-set-up
vinyl system has a fullness, immediacy and warmth that CD players
can duplicate only if they cost several thousand dollars.
Even
so, I didn't exactly have to shove my way through a thronging crowd
at the record show. But it was fairly well-attended by a mix of
people: old and young, anoraky and seemingly normal. I ended up
with 12 records for the price of two CD's. True, there's no guarantee
until they are played that they aren't noisy or worn. But if nothing
else, I'll have bought a nice piece of cover art for a couple of
dollars.
There
were a few fairly young people at the show and I initially wondered
how a young person today will have the patience to carefully take
a record out of its sleeve, place it on a turntable, set the tonearm
(most high-quality turntables are not automatic), clean the stylus
regularly…
But
think of the kind of energy that goes into maintaining the MySpace
profile, managing songlists, chatting on multiple windows and keeping
up with pop culture that swooshes past if you so much as stop to
tie your shoelace (which is, of course, why so many kids walk around
with shoelaces flapping). If the reports of a vinyl comeback are
true, we're in luck. No more will people who claim they don't like
the sound of MP3 be assumed to be hearing-impaired Luddites. And
what joy it'll be to see teenagers running back home with new record
purchases under their arms, instead of loitering at the mall with
those silly white buds growing out of their ears.
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