Vinyl Snobbery vs. The Disgrace of Buying Used CDs vs. Downloading Directly to Devices

Buying music has always been a sacred ritual for me.  I go into a record store with a list of possible album-targets in my head, find those targets, and, as I look through the racks for them, get other ideas about what I maybe want to buy.  I spend 30-60 minutes in this mode, and wind up with an armload of music.  Then I look at how much money I’ve got to work with and start the heartbreaking process of whittling down.  Once I’m inside my cash money window, I pay up and hustle home to chow down on the new tunes.  The ritual has been the same, essentially, since I was 11 years old.  I remember making my first album purchase-- Elton John’s Caribou (does anyone remember “The Bitch Is Back?”)—in precisely this way at Laury’s Records in Evanston.  From Laury’s, Big Daddy’s, Vintage Vinyl, and the Record Exchange growing up in Evanston to Record Service and Record Swap at college in Champaign to Second Hand Tunes, Val’s Halla Records, Laurie’s Planet of Sound, Reckless Records, and dozens of other places in and around Chicago as an adult, I repeated the same ritual with a hallowed kind of joy.

I now have roughly 2,000 records in my living room, and  I spin ‘em pretty regularly on a medium grade Dual turntable run through a audiophile warm-sounding but slowly dying Harmon-Kardon receiver and out to still fat bottomed, gorgeous McIntosh speakers inherited from my dad.  I spent many years pouring every spare cent I had into purchasing record albums , and so I am a longtime connoisseur of album art and lyrics, and I take pleasure and pride in knowing who played what on which tracks, where and when things were recorded, etc.  Covers, inner sleeves, lyric sheets, liner notes, and black discs still coat the flat surfaces of my home.  Album sides provide a wonderful kind of format and structure for a wonderfully satisfying sized musical meal, every bit as varied and refined as Symphonic movements, and musicians’ careful sequencing of tracks to fit this structure is an important element in their artistic expression.  I love vinyl.  I have been entertained to see that new albums are now often released on vinyl as well as other formats and gratified that old-fashioned record stores are making a resurgence, at least around Chicago.  Folks found in these stores are My People—music lovers who grew up performing the same sacred music acquisition ritual in the same way as myself.  There is now, however, a palpable retro-purist snobbery many of these folks exude—somehow records or the fact that they continue to purchase them are superior to CDs, downloads, and / or the purchase thereof.  T-shirts, magnets, and other merch emblazoned with pictures of records and phrases like “Vinyl Rules” or “Side With Me” is peddled alongside used and new records in these stores.  I suppose some of this is attendant to any nostalgic phenomenon or retro-fad and is also fueled by a related anti-technology backlash, however…

 …this is an elitism to which I cannot subscribe. Records are swell, very swell indeed, but, like all technologies, imperfect—they scratch, skip, and degrade, you can’t listen to them on the go (while walking, for goodness sake!), you do hafta flip them over every 20 minutes which is sometimes a drag, you do always hafta listen to songs in the same order, and they take up huge amounts of space.  When CDs came on the scene, I switched over, and so…

…I also have probably 500-700 Compact Discs.  They are also fine, swell, dandy—compact (as their name suggests), easier in some ways to work with than albums (you don’t hafta flip them, it’s easy to mess with track order for kicks and giggles, and you can put ‘em in a Walkman type device—that’s what we old folks used before iPods—and listen to ‘em on the go), and they still include cool visuals, lyrics, and liner notes and performer info in their packaging (though as I get older, my weakening eyeballs have more and more trouble reading stuff on the tiny CD booklets—truly a format for young people).  Though they are not what I was raised on, I like CDs just fine, too.  Interestingly, CDs weren’t around long enough, however, to accumulate much nostalgic history, and so, while used CDs are available in retro-style music record / music stores, they are clearly given second-tier status.  They don’t get first billing in window and in-store displays, don’t take up much shelf space in the stores, and there is no merch for elitist nostalgians to purchase to broadcast their CD-lover pride.  I actually feel almost embarassed to go into a music store and buy CDs now, sensing silent disapproval from the vinyl purists in the aisles.

As we know, in recent years, CDs have been going the way of the Dinosaurs, too.  New CD retailing has rapidly evaporated.  iPods and other music storage devices have made it possible to carry tens, hundreds, even thousands of albums worth of music around for easy access when walking driving, at work, or anyplace else.  You can’t really access cover art or lyrics or find out who played bass on which track or where and when something was recorded as easily, but you can store a simply mind-boggling quantity of music in a device that fits in the palm of your hand and access it with just a few finger strokes.  There’s a certain snobbery to downloaders, too.  “I’m over it—I don’t need to own the material object,” a friend of mine pontificated not too long ago.  As a longtime lover of album paraphernalia in either vinyl or CD format, this kinda bugged me, too…

…and so my position is this: all of these formats are great and have their place.  Walking and listening is now a central part of my life, and, indeed, the ability to listen while walking has been a big personal triumph for me, unfortunately not discovered until recently:  it has put me back in closer touch with my listening muse, allowed me to get some LONG needed exercise, and prompted me to start this little blog, and so, while I was raised on vinyl, love records, and still often listen to music the old-fashioned way at home, I do not believe vinyl is in any way a superior way to consume music.  I also love CDs, and actually used CDs are my most frequent record-store targets because they are CHEAP and I can easily save them to my computer and portable iPod device, but also still access the print media and information attendant to the albums (let’s be frank here—yes, you can digitize music from vinyl now, too, but it’s a much more messy, time consuming, tedious, and deeply flawed process than it is moving stuff from CDs).  And downloading is fine, too—if you don’t wanna know or look at all the visual and printed crap that I do that’s connected to an album, that’s fine—the music is really the thing.

Please just get your music however you want and save the ‘tude—it’s kinda rude.