Posted on 06/01/2011 12:25:28 PM PDT by GSWarrior
Brendan Toller’s documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store (2010) brings a good deal of personality and attitude (in the best sense) to the story of the demise of the independent record store, though it might just as well tell the story of the demise of the independent video or book store, all of which are victims of the same forces: box store encroachment followed by on-line revolution, all feeding the bottom lines of large corporations that don’t particularly give a damn about records, or movies, or books. The restaurant business has been similarly decimated. Applebee’s anyone?
I am a fierce advocate of free-market capitalism, and yet I have to agree with Toller that something has gone wrong when Wal-Mart sells 20% of all albums and those albums are largely the work of corporate mannequins like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. My mid-sized Southern college town has one remaining used record store and one remaining used book store. Our last independent video store closed in December, and our Borders – which drove out our independent book and record stores – recently got a dose of its own medicine and closed amid a blaze of luridly florescent signage of the kind you associate with particularly tacky used car lots.
I’ll have to explain to my young daughter how likeminded people used to gather – in the flesh – to mingle, swap notions and preferences, and listen to whatever was on the turntable. I will have to recreate the lost world of my youth, and tell how I roamed the second-hand record stores of Boston and Cambridge, spending hours in grungy mouse-holes like Mystery Train (named in honor of the Elvis tune), and how I timidly put my fourteen-year-old inquiries to the superior wisdom of pierced twenty-four-year-olds, who had, in fact, heard everything and evolved a real critical acumen. Between 1988 and 1992, I spent many procrastinative late afternoons at Cutler’s in New Haven (still there!). I once asked the sagacious manager about Moby Grape’s first album, about which I’d read in The Rolling Stone Record Guide (before it annoyingly became the “album guide”). He said that the record was out of print but that he had a copy (of course) and that he’d make me a tape. My tape was waiting for me the next day, as promised. You don’t get that kind of service – that degree or any degree of giving a damn – at Wal-Mart.
I will have to convey to my daughter what an elegant physical object the long-playing vinyl record was: how heavy as it balanced on the fingertips, how mysteriously engraved, hypnotic in its rotation, poignantly delicate and prone to time’s different kind of engraving.
Explain also how eye-catching and sometimes beautiful album art was and how much the art mattered. Certain album covers were indelible objects of fascination. Blue Note’s myriad masterpieces of cover design (see here) seemed to inscribe a whole worldview of avant-gardism and cool, a kind of visual code for high modernism in its African-American dimension. On more sober and mature reflection, I realize that Blue Note created one of the supreme caches of modern American design. I adored the Warhol banana on the first Velvet Underground album (1967) and the Mapplethorpe portrait on Patti Smith’s Horses (1976). It’s reasonable to surmise that album art, like comic books, filled a gaping visual void in middle-class American life and inspired countless young people to begin to think about the world in visual terms.
I will also have to explain that technology is not necessarily progressive and that the long-playing record actually sounded better.
I will have to explain, finally, that each record somehow told the story of its own history. In I Need That Record, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s guitarist, beautifully elegizes the LP as an artifact in this sense:
"I’m a fan of the download. I like to hit enter and have the song appear on my iTunes within seconds, but there’s something about holding the artifact, about feeling it in your hand. It reveals a lot about the moment in time that the record was made. An abstract song could come from anywhere, but if you see something in a twelve-inch vinyl LP, with the cover art, or you hear the scratch in the 78, you get a sense of time and place that is, for me, irreplaceable."
When my daughter asks what happened to record companies and record stores and to the records themselves, I will have to answer honestly, “I’m not really sure.” Communism is a potential analogy: decades of self-imposed misery, the illogic of which was demonstrated by the almost instantaneous evaporation and repudiation of the offending system. Does capitalism have phases of communistic heartlessness and aimlessness and self-destruction? Perhaps we too will eventually exclaim, “Good lord, what are we doing to ourselves,” and our equivalent of the Berlin Wall will suddenly become the pile of rubble it was, in actuality, all along.
Fred Goodman’s classic The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce is a good place to begin an inquiry into what the hell has gone wrong (1998). I Need That Record updates the story.
Digital media have partially loosened the bottleneck created by the record companies, but on-line existence is comparatively sterile and un-educational in the broadest life sense. It’s great to watch, say, Wanda Jackson or Hound Dog Taylor on YouTube (here and here), but there’s no getting around the fact that you remain at your desk, not having had to foray into the world of sights and sounds and chance encounters. And, in any case, where are today’s Wanda Jacksons? Where are the A&R men and independent record store owners working on behalf of the next Wanda Jackson, not because they want a spread in the Hamptons, but because they instinctively want to live in a world that’s a little more spirited?
“My point is, without specialty shops, you have a harder time accessing specialty content....unless you actively seek it out.”
My point is, I guess, specialty shops themselves represented actively seeking things out. If it became a habit to some, well, so can surfing the web. Only moreso, as it’s infinitely easier.
That’s only true if you’re from a town with nothing but big box chain stores.
The indie shops represented a community, a curated pick of quality material that wasn’t initially promoted in the mainstream. There were artists with regional popularity, or hometown support now.
You don’t get that with a massive database virtual store, flooded with titles that never sell a single copy.
Computer harddrives are prone to crashing and CD-Rs are highly unstable (10-20 year shelflife tops). Unless the digital files are forever flying around the web, the content will disappear from the face of the earth.
I don’t see why an unplayed record would not still be playable 100 years from now (apart from warpage which still could be tracked, even old 8mm films like the Zapruder film of JFK can’t run through a projector anymore but can be scanned in to reveal information (including the imagery that extended to the sprocket holes)). The plastic groves aren’t unstable or “prone to rot”. Accetates can flake, yes, but pressed vinyl, not so much.
I spent a career around jet engines. A close & play record player (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3mqNbgXxXE&feature=related) would give better audio than I can hear. I’m fine with downloading mp3s that I can carry in a matchbox sized stereo giving me tunes while jogging.
People have access to unlimited information on the internet. They are still idiots when it comes to politics, history, economics, science, and music.
Guidance and mentorship can be good thing. Doesn’t mean that you can’t discover some things (or truths) on your own. But wandering in a vast wasteland (or the warehouse at the Smithsonian) doesn’t mean that you will automatically gravitate to what you are looking for.
Life experiences provide understanding and context. Being told that some obscure cut is “good” may not sound that way if you haven’t heard “this” or grown up in that environment.
The signal to noise ratio of people hyping things has become higher than ever. And now we have hipsters for food called “foodies”.
No one would put up with their friend telling them EVERY meal what they had for breakfast, lunch and dinner the day before. On line, they think we all give a damn.
The internet music options are pretty much the same. You’ll be advised on a lot but you’d better have a good BS filter. And if you want to BUY something rather than just copy it, you still have to find a vendor.
Another way to look at it - the music industry hasn’t raised the technological bar. They should have pushed the tech standard to SuperCD and beyond. They should have innovated to deliver more compelling content made possible by the new technology. This they didn’t do and became a commodity in the process. I’m not sure what all the innovations should have or could have been - I guess some of these will emerge some day. Take Guitar Hero for example - basically someone figured out how to merge technology and music to create added value and the public ate it up. For the music industry to think that just sitting back and churning out 3 minute songs and that they could collect a King’s ransom in so doing seems wrong, certainly in retrospect, but also seemed wrong at the time.
Eh. So instead of the record store, it's just the local club that books the indie acts. You go to the show and then go home and download the mp3. To me, the best thing about mp3s is being able to buy a single track. If every artist was like Guy Clark and put out brilliant records start to finish, I wouldn't have a problem with buying the whole record. But even with artists I like, there's typically two or three tracks on an album that are worth listening to more than once. I'm not interested in paying $15 for two or three tracks. Lame.
I think he forgot how to go find them. It’s always been the case that indie stores rise and fall quickly, they lack the financial strength to survive setbacks, so the store you know and love tends to disappear when you don’t have time to go there for 6 months. That doesn’t mean they all died, just your favorite. Here in Tucson we’ve got a handful of indies, including an actual RECORD store no digital, but you can’t be surprised when one goes away, you just need to keep your eyes open for the others.
The problem with surfing he web as a way to find music, books or movies is on the web you find what you’re looking for, but rarely anything else. When you frequent a personally run media store you get exposed to things you weren’t looking for. You walk in to music on the stereo, the guys behind the counter get to know you and your taste, you run into other people and can chat with them. Some of my favorite bands I was exposed to because the record store guy said “well if you like them you should give these guys a try”, the web can’t do that. Amazon tries with “others who bought this bought” but it’s not the same as a person you see every couple of weeks. The web creates tunnel vision where the indie stores create buffets.
“it’s just the local club that books the indie acts.”
The problem is very few artists break even, or break out of just playing for their friends. It costs money to print posters, postcards, and drive to a gig. It still costs money to produce creative work on a level where you can make a living at it. Yes, some doors will open as a result of where things are going, but by and large, not even the big names are making money any more.
LPs are the only type of recorded music that dont require electricity to listen to.
I can’t argue with that, but I don’t really believe that thing were much different in the world before mp3s. There were still a bunch of people that wanted to play music for a living that were broke.
Just seems like this article is pure nostalgia. “Gee, wasn’t it great when I could go into the record store and find this great new band I’d never heard before?”
Sure, I guess, but I’d just rather listen to XM, hear a band I like, go on the Internet to the band’s website to see its tour dates and find when the band is coming to my city, buy tickets for the show on the Internet, and then download its album on iTunes. To me, that’s a heck of a lot better than standing in a record store with a set of grungy headphones that umpteen sweaty people wore before me. But that’s just me.
You must not have a Pandora account.
We have a good coffee shop, record shop, and hookah bar all in one. I just bought Music from Big Pink on vinyl.
Also, besides Pandora, there are a lot of music blogs that go pretty in depth to particular genres. I don't know your cup of tea for music, but two pretty good music blogs are Nine Bullets and Big Rock Candy Mountain.
I’ve played with Pandora, but with my music library it’s pretty rare to leave the playlist up to somebody else. 99% of what I remember about Pandora is that it had a really hard time accepting that I don’t like the Beatles, no matter what I started a list with the 5th song was always a Beatles song, I kept saying no but it kept pushing them anyway. It did remind me how much I like Joe Jackson though so it wasn’t a total loss. But it’s still not the personal touch. There’s a dramatic difference between the guy you see all the time at the record store saying “you gotta here this” and Pandora sticking it in some playlist you might not even be paying attention to.
Were you someone who actively sought out music before the Napster and Itunes era?
It’s definitely easier for the music fan, it’s just a different experience. Like home video or cable, that means more to chose from, and more access to the good stuff .... but ultimately, less good stuff, and the end of one culture for another.
Yeah, I don't like the Beatles, either. And it's gotten better. I found that Pandora is a bit better than Slacker with respect to the dislikes. I agree, though, the personal touch isn't there with Pandora.
But again blogs aren’t the same. That’s more of the tunnel vision, if you like genre X you might go read the blogs about it but you’re not going to go read a blog about a genre you don’t like or don’t know anything about. You could walk into a record store and hear anything, or be recommended anything. The web gives you what you’re looking for, the real world gives you what you didn’t even know existed.
And even more for me there’s just no reason to use it. Currently the MP3 library is 316GB, there’s a copy of it on the PC at home and a portable drive at work. For me to listen to Pandora I’ve got to be at a computer without the library, last time that happened the sister-in-law died and being the resident geek I was tasked with closing accounts and stuff, that was almost 2 years ago. I’ve never been much of a radio guy, I respect the technology of Pandora and it can be kind of fun to try to stump it (though I’ve never succeeded), but I’ve got the library.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.