Saturday, October 27, 2007
Final Nails in the Coffins of Vinyl
Curiosity grabbed me on the métro yesterday as the iPod shuffled in “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and so I’m posing this $64,000 question: What was the very last album you ever bought on vinyl?
Those of us of a certain age grew up buying record albums: 33-1/3-revolutions-per-minute black circles of grooves with grooves that could get warped, scratched or straight-up cracked if mishandled, in sleeves of cover artwork that remain the biggest loss suffered in the music industry’s shift to CDs (and, eventually, completely artless MP3s). My last album is above: The Joshua Tree by U2. I bought mine in 1988, a year after it dropped. The Bronx choir of Truman High School (where I spent my school daze) performed in the U2 concert movie Rattle and Hum, which turned me on to U2 in a roundabout way. But by 1988, I’d copped my first CD boombox and was goin digital buying up my very first compact discs: Michael Jackson’s Bad, Prince’s Lovesexy, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick. And so the final nail in the coffin of my wax collection was this Grammy-winning U2 joint.
But what’s your story? Take as long or short as you like.
Carla at 2:39 AM on 10/27/07:
For the record I was into U2 waaaay before that concert. I went to Truman with Miles and a girl named Renee, who sang on the choir, and got me all of their autographs because she KNEW how into them I was. I was into them back when War and Boy first came out. So there. That torn page from a program sadly got auctioned off to pay a storage bill. Ah well…
The last album(s) I remember going to the store and buying was Oranges and Lemons and Skylarking by XTC. It was at Sounds in the Village, where you can get shit for a buck if you’re a music geek and know where to look.
I can even tell you the 1st album I ever got. Zenyatta Mondatta by the Police when I was 9. I was in love with Sting after my uncles (music geeks themselves) took me to see Quadraphrenia ( I was a hip kid).
I lost all my vinyl, but DON’T FRET, MML! DJ culture will always keep it alive. Dubplates will never die. In contrast to the mass consumer who will BUY ANYTHING put in front of them, there will always be those who will hunt and peck until they find that rare pressing of some old acid house track that they heard back in 89. My boy DJ Courage needed a whole U Haul truck for just his records. Fuck clothes or a toaster. Records. He buys them everyday. People give them to him. He finds them in the street.
The same people who sold us on CD’s are now telling you thats gonna die too because of ipods, and we all remember what happened to cassettes.
My advice to you, MY-YULES is to start DJing. You know you want to. Its been calling you like the crack be callin Pookie. Thats what this is about, dear. Its the frustrated DJ in you crying out. Take the plunge. If you do, you’ll be up to your eyeballs in vinyl and will wish for your teeny little mp3 player again.
Just think, when your kids are teenagers they may just ping some signal into your brain and you just sit there hearing music in your head. That’s gonna be fun, eh? You think people with their headphones on are annoying wait till someone invents that shit.