Irregular Writings
November 2013
Creative consumers & nostalgic gloop
Why the hell would you want to go back to the age of vinyl? Blahhhhh.
Hey this was supposed to be a continuation of last issue’s meditation upon the sadness that is the return of vinyl. But it’s 2014 and writing slow like that is pretty impossible to do. I mean a slow ruminative sequel to a thought piece from the world of a month before. In this world there is the new, but very much settled in phenomenon whereby the audience – the readers – get to talk back. The commentariat is alive and throbbing.
It’s no longer a situation where your Pericles or your Tony Hancock or Paul Robinson (Neighbours villain) gets to orate at length and with lashings of pauses and turnarounds and then subsides into silence to better accept the swelling applause. Now the gallery carries on the theme, takes it in hand and moulds it to a tone and a shape more to their preferences and flings it back in pieces into the middle of the flimsy room. Often they start as soon as they sense a stoppage, before the trick is up. There was a dull roar on social media and the home screens with Irregular Writings this last issue, with many a FELLOW opining upon anything to do with the taste or feel of vinyl. People lectured at will to the newly sprung room about the qualities of sound carried by acetate and vinyl and how much “warmer” and fuzzier it was.
I did not come to argue that point. I didn’t care, I was just telling the time and worrying as to why this outdated, frankly quaint form of sound carriage had made a noticeable return. I don’t care about the arguments for and against the quality; it’s about the nagging idea that it was another situation where the tail was wagging the dog. Musicians were being told what to do – again. Told to get with it. Like they were silly fools who dreamed sad dreams and right here was a real world, buddy. Nobody ever stops to think that musicians might be ahead of them? They might be the actual fabled canaries in the coal mine – fearlessly running on ahead. I tell you straight. People buying vinyl records is a way for them to be CREATIVE CONSUMERS. That’s it.
The future and the past making the present. The future being pretty sewn up. They have all this technology but it keeps getting contained and constrained. Like the internet is actually possibly HUGE but it’s made itself tiny in these skinny little social networks. All the talk of music is in the same fuddy duddy language as 1962. Before the Beatles. STARS and CHARTS and lame bands of boys singing together or young girls being IT for a summer, before they FALL. What’s OUTSIDE of all that? Where is there an Australian TV show where something genuinely spontaneous or shocking could happen? Is it all just for football players galumphing about like fools? Or panel shows of comedians talking about everything but nothing? Or spaces where advertising copywriters get to rag on that old Murry Wilson (father of Brian, Carl and Dennis) song “I’m a genius too ya know!”
That’s what’s so funny about the music scene (which is the pointy end of a larger collection of scenes); it should be going much faster than it seems to. It’s the perception and the sense of possibilities. They’re being geared and braked. What a strange dream I had when I was a boy when AM radio pretty much played ONLY NEW MUSIC? We live in a world where people have been convinced that that is not possible. PEOPLE would just not cop it. Did you know that the early days of radio were only concerned with live music? Also that the idea of a repetitive playlist for radio was dreamed up by two young Yanks after the Second World War after watching drunks play the same song over and over on a country jukebox? People laughed at them – “Why would you want to hear the same stuff over and over? Folks will not stand for it!” Did you know that Australian commercial radio adds perhaps six new songs a month? Any more would bring the whole shithouse down in a roaring pyre of flames! So commercial radio is a tightly controlled and EXTREMELY limited playlist fit only for a young male builders labourer or his even younger sister who is at high school. For everybody else it’s just a turgid backwash of nostalgic gloop.
But why do you need radio when it could all go so much faster? Because music gets a buzz and a resonance when it’s in a tangible or recognisable PUBLIC area. When there’s a chaotic possibility of something coming into you that was beyond your control. Something swept there by powerful, unknowable, unconscious mass impulses. Undeniable ideas from somewhere out there. Otherwise, it’s just people with white wires in their ears shut off from each other. That would be horrible, no? Even if you were holding a new vinyl album under your arm.
@davegraney
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