Kids today wouldn’t understand why we’d willingly listen to music laced with imperfections. The pops, the crackles, the static hiss when needle meets vinyl. Digital music is brushed free of all imperfection. Nothing but perfectly reproduced digital audio downloaded right to your iTunes library. The digital music revolution has done great things for remastering and other technical wizardry of which I’m probably grateful, but not particularly aware. But therein lies the greatest flaw in all those perfectly aligned zeros and ones: benign and unholy imperfection. Consider your favorite writers, authors that reach a balance between logical progression and unpredictable improvisation. The greatest novels, like the greatest jazz compositions follow logical and regular musical patterns that frame illogical solo improvisation. Consider the music of Coleman Hawkins or the inimitable Thelonious Monk. Consider Colson Whitehead. His novel Sag Harbor was, at its heart, a standard coming-of-age story, but the details of his Just play it loud!! Okay? protagonist’s experience leapt off the page in vibrant three-dimensional color and shape because life, like the protagonist’s experience, doesn’t rise steadily until reaching an ultimate and resolving denouement. Life is chaos, a series of regular routines flanking wild seat-of-your-pants improvisation. Digital music, while it satisfies our innate (but very contemporary) desire to be better, faster, newer — it contradicts the imperfection that makes us human. Vinyl records, in all their humility, awkwardness and frailty echo our own wanting souls. They are our siblings from another mother (or in this analogy another Thomas Edison). The response to a phonograph is visceral, primal perhaps, whereas we recognize with a certain about of sonic intellectualism why digital media sounds “better.” It sounds better because it sounds cleaner. It sounds better because it is more convenient and travels in the brains of thumbnail-sized iPods and doesn’t consume rooms with milk crates. It sounds better because it can be played in Dolby Digital 7.2 surround systems at excessively loud volumes without much distortion. But when you get right down to comparing the sound of vinyl against the sound of a compact disc (forget compressed audio) which sounds more real? That more accurately recalls a time and a place at a subconscious level? Which medium reproduces the sound that echoes life, that sometimes gets interrupted by a hairline imperfection, that skips and repeats and needs regular maintenance and attention? Without that maintenance and attention we slip into sporadic bouts of anxiety, depression and first world Sonic Boom? malaise. I do not mean to denigrate digital media entirely; I only aim to point out that progress isn’t always a full step forward. More often than not progress proves to be a lateral sashay. There’s a place in our collections for both because we carry out our first world modern lives in two worlds. In the so-called real world we are increasingly forced to be more timely, more exact, more beautiful than is our nature. We also need our media scrubbed clean and portable. People need alarm clocks loud enough to emit sonic boom (yes, this really exists because Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me told me so) just to get out of bed in the morning because our tendencies are toward sleeping in, being late, missing that 8:00am conference call. Our tendencies are toward imperfection. We float through this world projecting, feigning perfection; it is only at home, with our turntables and sweatpants that we can be honest with ourselves and embrace the chaos.
Change is inevitable. This is what we tell ourselves while we cling to the things of our past – the music, movies, cartoons, trappings of our youth, or at least more youthful years. The things that just aren’t made like they used to be and never will be again. Change is the driver of the creepy van with spray-painted art on the side and no windows. Change tells you to get in. At first you resist, but he is persistent and makes convincing arguments about progress and evolution. And he just won’t take “no” for an answer. Change is like Bono telling you to give the next U2 record a chance.
Bono: You know you want it. It’ll be grand. Rolling Stone called it the best since All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
Me: No, really, thanks for the offer but… [sigh]… fine, it’ll never be as good as Achtung Baby or Joshua Tree or even October or [sigh] Pop… but here’s a twenty. Just keep the change.
Bono: How about a few extra quid to save starving children in Rwanda?
Me: Fine. Actually, here’s my bank PIN #. Take whatever you want and send me the Deluxe Vinyl Edition with the acoustic outtakes from Rattle and Hum.
This is what we do. We march forward, but not without taking certain things with us, whatever we can carry. Others get left behind in the 90s, like Boyz II Men. We’ve accepted their fate, the temporary nature of their existence even when one of them pops up on a reality TV series and the quartet books a date at Heinz Hall. Since I am no longer 15, I will consider attending in passing, to acknowledge the whimsy I might still possess and acknowledge that at one point in my life I knew all the words to every song on Cooleyhighharmony. But we change. And we evolve, sometimes motivated by self preservation but more often by absolute necessity.
Did I mention that Stage AE has 16 oz Guinness drafts for $5?
This rumble has nothing to do with records or vinyl or a new and recommended purchase. It might actually seem to be against recorded music. That, however, couldn’t be further from my point. Without recorded music, live music wouldn’t have impromptu sing-a-longs, organic ping pong ball tosses or a following greater than that of your popular local band. (Here in Pittsburgh I’m thinking of the Clarks’ level of fame). Sometimes, however, it seems we’re too busy managing our iTunes libraries to bother with live music anymore. I think about going to five or six shows for every one that I attend. Life gets in the way; we’re in too many places at once. It’s just easier to pick up the City Paper, note all the cool shows and never see any of them. That’s not to say that every show is worth the effort. Really, honestly, when was the last time you saw a memorable amphitheater show? I’d have to point to a Red Hot Chili Peppers show in Atlanta after the release of Californication. Memorable, that is, in the ways in which that show killed my appreciation for the record. Lifeless. Workman-like. I was glad when it was over. And they tragically played very little from Blood Sugar Sex Magic.
