Back in 2019 I wrote a post, Our Retro Future, about the strange revival of the vinyl LP in today’s society, thirty years after the rise of the CD seemingly killed it off.
That CD’s in turn were killed off by the rise of computer-disk-based devices like the iPod and then the solid state world of iPhones, where thousands of songs could be stored and pulled up at the touch of a finger, followed by the rise of pure streaming services like Spotify, surely meant that “records” and “record players” – three tech generations back in time – would be even less likely to make a comeback.
But they have:
When I flip that album sleeve between my fingers, carefully extract the record, lay it gently on the turntable, and softly drop the diamond needle into the grooves, I’ll be reliving some long-ago moments with great friends.
And I’ll also have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m not nostalgically alone, as millions of Millenials and Gen Z’s do the same.
But now there appears to be a new reason for this revival, even though it starts with a writer who noticed the same thing about record sales that I did in the original post, The (Not So) Strange Return of the Vinyl LP:
It’s not just the thrill of discovery or that nostalgic sense of freedom that keeps me hunting for new (old) albums… the more I think about it, the more I think there’s something else going on… something that is also related to that damned algorithm, but in a much more nefarious way.
I have a growing fear of censorship… of the mass memory-holing of anything that doesn’t toe whatever the latest “NPC” line might be. What amounts to, essentially, the willful destruction of our culture and all it has produced or achieved in pursuit of some unattainable Utopian ideal. I worry that it won’t be long before Rock N’ Roll sits firmly in the crosshairs of a new generation of Woke Scolds who want to purge the Earth of anything they deem “problematic”… things like “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll”, for example. And because of the dizzying pace of technological advancement, I’m absolultely terrified that they are going to figure out a way to do it so that we won’t even notice it when they do.
The people who have been cheering on the destruction of statues in the US and Britain over the last few years, and more recently the re-writing of classic books to remove all the nasty, offensive stuff that might trigger snowflakes (Memorising books to keep them from the firemen) might be a bit shocked when the Rolling Stone’s classic, Brown Sugar, also gets deleted.
Or maybe not. In fact it may be that some of the Democrats and US lefties who objected to Tipper Gore’s campaign against Rap Music in the 1990’s will now be fully onboard for such censorship.
Aside from records all this may cause a revival of other primitive technologies too; I just bought several hundred dollars worth of books from the Book Depository before they closed down for good last night.
No Minister 
If you are going back to vinyl recordings why not go back to the wax cylinder or the player piano?
Its all pretentious BS.
You might be in the Mississippi Delta on a sultry afternoon as an old man with his resonator guitar using a stainless steel knife as a slide belts out “Black Betty” on his front porch
You might capture an approximation of the sound waves at your listening position via some recording apparatus, which maybe good, bad or indifferent
And you might transfer whatever you have captured to some other media that it maybe shared with others who may then listen to it through air pods or the most expensive audio equipment money can buy…
… but what ever, the real flavour of that hot Mississippi afternoon has been lost
When you listen to music in your car, the purpose is to sooth your soul as you queue at the roundabout and the instrument that is actually playing is your car audio system which is doing a fairly good job of imitating David Bowie or EmmyLou Harris and the instruments that accompany them but what you are listing to is the car audio a far more sophisticated version of the player piano
I think that response might have been more appropriate to that 2019 post of mine.
This one is really more about vinyl records being part of a retreat to past technologies that are harder to change (censor) .
Are they harder to change, or is the noise stored on electronic media and transferred to vinyl as required?
I’m not a fan of recorded “music” and consider vinyl, tapes etc. with their demand you buy the whole thing to get, often, one song, just short of chicken wings on the mass fraud scale.
Heh. About twenty years ago my entire CD collection got burgled and when the insurance ponied up for it there were quite a few albums that I refused to buy for that reason.
But with the appearance a few years later of things like iTunes, I could buy just the one song, which is great.
However, I can see the concern about censorship being a partial driver here – it certainly has been in movies for a while, especially on streaming platforms – and TPTB could still censor at the root where original recordings are transferred onto different media like records, CD’s or DVD’s.
But it’s still better than having an e-book be changed before your eyes.
As far as you not being a fan of recorded music all I can say is that people’s demand to hear music when and where they want, has succeeded completely while actually producing an increase in live music, including – if this is what you’re hinting at with “music” – classical music.
Well I tried to keep it cerebral Tom…
… but as we know the West is on the road the leads to Pol Pot with the erasure of all heritage and culture whether it be relatively recent things like songs like “Black Betty”, deliberately misunderstood, and the more recent “Brown Sugar” or beloved movies like “Gone with the Wind” or Shakespearean plays, not that most modern Westerners, who are often tattooed, pierced savages decked out like denizens of the stone age but utilizing 21st century technologies to perform their bodily mutilations, are intellectually equipped to even comprehend Shakespeare.
But there you go – I did my best to be conversational but as usual we end up in the topic of our times, the utter collapse of Western Culture into the cess pit
Tom, while I appreciate Orchestral or Big Band music (instrumental only) I also like some other stuff (Beatles, Linda Ronstadt, some faster C&W stuff etc.) but far prefer the “silence” of a remote stream with the birds, insects, water etc.
Even a car just making it’s normal noise is better than what has been described as the opium of the masses.
Probably the result of years of having to have noise blasting into my ears because paying customers were too fucking thick to hold a conversation.
Well book depository closing down had passed me by until it’s too late. That is a real loss. Although our local book shops might not agree.
It caught me by surprise too and I had to do a frantic search of my “wishlist” on the site that was set up years ago, to see what I could still get from the libraries.
However, I’ve been expecting this for a long time since Amazon took them over in 2011. I’m still an Amazon customer (barely), but unlike BD they don’t deliver to NZ or anywhere else for free.
For uncensored ebooks, presented as first published, go to sites like https://www.fadedpage.com/ or https://www.gutenberg.org/. Just finished reading all of Neville Shutes books as originally published.
I bought tons of vinyl LPs in the 80s. Jack Kluts used to give me a 10% discount at Chelsea Records in Manners Mall whenever I would struggle to the cash register with a huge pile of LPs. I used to wash them under warm water and gently scrub them with a toothbrush and dishwashing liquid, rinse and then play them wet so the stylus hydroplaned over the grooves giving (supposedly) better sound quality and I’d record them onto high quality (again supposedly) chrome cassette tape to play on my walkman on the bus and train journey to and from work.
I was not sorry to see vinyl go when CDs appeared even though CDs were significantly more expensive and early CD players had an irritating tendency to skip and repeat at random intervals.
When iTunes was released I sampled all my CDs at 128Kbps into my desktop Mac and appreciated the ability to compile playlists and search for songs instead of having to browse racks of CDs. I bought a 40GB iPod and listened to music on the train journey to and from work in Sydney. I resampled all my CDs into iTunes at 256Kbps a few years later for demonstrably better sound quality.
I can see the nostalgia value of vinyl for today’s youngsters who were not yet born when it was the only music purchasing option other than cassette.
I do not share their enthusiasm, however, and will be staying with iTunes and listening to music when out and about on my 64GB iPhone SE R2.