Fred Wilson talks about vinyl LPs and says he might start buying his music on vinyl again. He says if you really want to collect music, LPs are the way to go.
I suspect Fred misses the good old days when listening to music was the thing, itself. As opposed to something you do while you’re doing something else. These days everything is compressed. Time. Music. Fun. Back in the day, we’d put Frampton Comes Alive on the turntable, sit back and just enjoy the sound. Same with the Allman’s At Fillmore East, and the best one of all- Europe ’72. We’d read the album covers and the liner notes. We never felt hurried, like we should be doing something else.
Our record collections were tangible. We could browse through them like books. The joy of picking out a record, taking it out of the sleeve and putting it on the turntable was a ritual to our passion.
Then came the bombs.
MTV started the assault by killing the radio star. The Disney Channel continues that same assault today, by making the music very tangential to the show or the person or the product. Nashville does its part by marketing media creations as country stars.
The effect of all of this is that music, for music’s sake, is quickly becoming an antiquidated pastime. Like horseshoes and croquet. The purists still enjoy it, but the rest of the world uses music as a garnish for some other main course.
I don’t know if going back to LPs can turn the tide. But I know there’s no sense of anticipation when clicking on an MP3 like there was waiting for Duane to hammer out the slide guitar riff at the beginning of Statesboro Blues.
