I am starting to think the vinyl boom has gotten ridiculous
Not that it will stop me
We have a very gender-normalized agreement in my household: I am not to comment on my partner’s quantity of clothing and shoes, or the acquisition/organization thereof, and she is to extend the same courtesy to my record collection, within reason, provided neither person’s expenditures begin to suggest the manifestation of an urgent psychological issue.
I believe this is fair. We all have our thing, and mine, at some point during the past decade, became my records. I got a turntable in the late 2000s, and my interest in vinyl roughly coincides with the format’s retail rebound, as it journeyed from sub-niche to subculturally trendy to prominently available at Target. On and off during the 2000s and 2010s, I worked at a record store mostly on trade and would usually take home a handful of LPs after every shift, adding up to a collection of what is now about 1,200 titles.
In recent years, my record habit has accelerated thanks to two developments. First, I bought a house, which is an excellent move for people interested in dying under dusty piles of analog media, but also for anyone who wants to stop lugging a goddamn record collection from rental space to rental space. Minus the likelihood of someday having to be moved by a guy with an aging back, the beast can now grow unencumbered.
Second, the pandemic. At the onset of COVID, I was living alone and working from home, an alignment of circumstances that could have easily gone sideways. I occupied my mind by burrowing deep into my records, which I had started to manage as if I were overseeing an actual library or tending a garden. As I listened, I began adding every album to my Discogs catalog, and tracking the dates I’ve played them.
This is a manual form of something I later learned was called “scrobbling,” which means digitally tracking one’s listening for the purposes of statistical analysis and/or obsessive-compulsive patterning. Discogs allegedly integrates with the Last.fm scrobbler, but I have never figured out how to make that work. Plus, I have a system I vastly prefer, which is to manually mark every record as I listen with a date-stamp on a post-it note stuck to the back of each sleeve. If it seems backwards, it is. But the advantage over digital scrobbling is that with the physical stamp, I can see how recently I have listened to a record while I’m browsing on my shelves, rather than having to check on a digital platform. Analog-to-analog optimization, you might say.
Records circulate throughout the home via a painstaking system that is comprehensible to nobody besides me. They are divided into the “permanent” display collection — the 100 or so records that are shelved prominently in the living room, consisting of classics, personal favorites and notable new finds — and the “archives.” That’s everything else that occupies the majority of an IKEA Kallax unit in my office.
Records move between the display collection and the archives all the time. When I bring home a few new records, they join the “to be played” crate that also holds records I’ve brought down from upstairs, all vying for my attention like neglected children. Anytime I play a record, I’ll stamp it and set it to one side of the stereo. Once that area is filled. I grab the pile, verify each record is correctly listed in my Discogs library, then enter the date-stamps into my notes field, and then list each title in a monthly Substack post (a wildly popular series). From that pile, I might pick a few to join the downstairs display collection or want to play again before they go back to the library. There is a shelf for these “in transit” titles next to the main display shelf — not to be confused with the “to be played crate” — which also contains new acquisitions that have already been played at least once. (Generally I listen to a new one at least twice before filing it in either the library or the display collection.)
Once all of this administrative work is done, I’ll take the stack upstairs and re-file them in the library, at which point I will pull a new stack of records to bring downstairs and re-start the process. While re-filing, I’ll look for records I don’t think I’ve heard in a while, and wouldn’t you know, I’ve got date-stamps to tell me. I average about a two-year cycle through the whole collection.
I’m sure this is totally normal
Very little of this is what rational people would call “necessary.” But after the music industry pivoted away from physical formats, I realized I didn’t enjoy listening to music digitally — via iTunes or later streaming — nearly as much as I did when I went through iterations of the process outlined above. This is the argument every analog fetishist makes, but the steps of selecting an album from a collection that has been carefully curated, in a manner that makes sense only to the owner, is a far more satisfying experience than hearing a song from a playlist. When all of the world’s recorded music is available instantly and freely (more or less), the value of the experience cheapens accordingly, but value can be recovered through ritual. The work of choosing an album, appreciating the sleeve as a physical object and dropping the needle yourself offers a proportional reward to the effort exerted (and proportional disappointment when the music sucks).
Lacking an extremely expensive stereo system and a sufficiently trained ear, I have always been agnostic about the alleged supremacy of vinyl’s sound quality. But as a listening experience, I vastly prefer it to digital formats for the above reasons, which are obvious enough for the major record labels to have long ago figured out how to exploit.
The industry’s biggest artists now recognize vinyl as a high-margin revenue stream. (The new Taylor Swift album set a record for single-week vinyl sales thanks in part, surely, to fans buying multiple of its many editions). Labels, drunk on the proceeds from archival reissues, have created traffic jams at the few available pressing plants, causing prohibitive production delays for indie artists. Record Store Day, which is often credited for the format’s resurgence, years ago became the music-buying equivalent of going to a bar on St. Patrick’s Day — the people who are serious about their vice know better — and has created supply-chain mayhem because of the demand it has stoked for special releases.
This stuff is easy enough to ignore for people who prefer to browse the used racks, as I do. Up-cycling and all that. And I have allowed myself to remain in denial about how extensively my preoccupation with vinyl has opened me up to being bullshitted. But one moment in particular might have punctured this armor permanently.
How it feels to be something logically tenuous
Recently I found a used vinyl copy of Sunny Day Real Estate’s “How It Feels to Be Something On,” an album I loved dearly in the late 1990s. It was a 2016 Sub Pop reissue and not an original pressing, but still, cool score! I took it home and immediately played it, and those opening notes of “Pillars” whisked my sense-memory right back to the smoky off-campus rooms where I first encountered this beguiling band half a lifetime ago. I remember the album having some cool artwork, so as it played, I dug around inside the sleeve until I came across...a CD booklet?
That’s right, the vinyl version of an album I already owned on CD came with the same fucking CD booklet, which Sub Pop had not bothered to reprint in a size commensurate with the space available in a record sleeve. I know bigger artwork is only one of the reasons to prefer records, but it’s a significant one when you start to pick apart the other stool-legs holding the logical edifice in place. This is a small bit of corner-cutting that surely kept the overhead lower for the album’s reissue, but it had a cascading effect on the series of interconnected illusions I maintain in order to convince myself that my vinyl habit is still justifiable.
I know that the “authenticity” of a vinyl listening experience is enormously subjective and that the superiority of the audio is probably not quantifiable. I know that it is usually better to listen to an album in whatever format was dominant at the time of its release, which for this album would have been the CD I already owned.
I know the reissue of “How It Feels to Be Something On” only exists because Xennials love vinyl and suddenly have adult income we will happily exchange for having our formative tastes reinforced. I know that most albums from this era weren’t even pressed to vinyl at the time of their original release because the medium was presumed dead. I know that the album probably was not mastered in a way that would optimize vinyl listening over CD or digital. I know that while the idea of mastering “for” vinyl is a dubious prospect, the album was not sequenced, mixed, packaged or conceived to be experienced that way.
I know that even if an album is recorded to analog tape, it will be entirely digitized somewhere between the mixing board and the pressing plant, meaning almost any recently released vinyl album has been reverse-engineered from a digital master in order to create the allegedly analog product I’m placing on my turntable. I know it is debatable what any of that actually means. I know that there is no need for it to exist in this format, except for there being a sucker who just wants to see it on his shelf between Donna Summer and Superchunk.
The way I interact with my record collection is something even I can recognize as a fleeting effort to impose meaning and order in a place where those things are no longer required. The infinitude of available music, and subsequently the collapse of taste and scarcity as organizing principles, has been destabilizing for a certain kind of mind. And being in possession of such a mind, I would love it if someone at least put in a minimal effort — printing a 12"x12" insert at Kinko’s, for fuck’s sake — to help me hold together the ever-flimsier logical house of cards that maintains my homeostasis as a music listener and thus a human being.