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I grew up with records and cassettes, but got rid of the few that I still owned about ten years ago. MP3's and streaming were much more convenient and everythin
by antfarm 6y ago
I grew up with records and cassettes, but got rid of the few that I still owned about ten years ago. MP3's and streaming were much more convenient and everything was available in an instance. I kept the ~50 CD's as they don't take up much room.
Three years ago, I started buying records again, the first being Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. My main interest in music nowadays is in Fusion Jazz, R&B, Funk and Soul Music from the early 1970's. I also got a decent Dual turntable from the 1980's to go with the nostalgic vibe.
To me, playing a record is a totally different and more conscious experience than playing a song on Spotify. Even just the necessity to remove the previous record before playing the next one feels archaic in these days where everything is available immediately. Limited availability is similiarly humbling: not owning every record I would like to, but also not even being able to acquire every record I'd like, as some are simply not available or expensive collector's items.
Then of course there is the haptic sensation, plus all the information you can get from studying the album cover. My generation's music discovery was full of surprises, when you had a record played for you at the record store that you mainly picked for the weird cover graphics or artist's name.
But the most important reason for me to buy records is to one day allow my daughter to discover this strange music from more than half a century ago that was always playing in the house when she was still young. Good luck trying to convince a teenager to have a listen at your Spotify playlist ;)
- agumonkey 6y agoThere's also a paradox in that now that we can have infinite songs anytime anywhere, music seems much less cultural relevant than in the past.
- antfarm 6y agoI just realized that what I wrote about records applies to CD's as well, so I was a bit off-topic there. By the way, I buy CD's as well, depending on what was the prevalent medium at the time the album was originally released.
- yomly 6y agoSorry to delve off topic but I have recently found myself in a similar point in music but have very little background knowledge of the area as I have basically just relied on following the rabbit hole of hip hop samples. Can you recommend some albums to get me started?
- antfarm 6y agoSome of my favorite records: Donald Byrd - Ethiopian Knights (1972) Cannonball Adderley: The Black Messiah (1972) The Cannonball Adderly Quintet - Country Preacher (1970) Jimmy Smith - Root Down (1972) King Curtis - Live at the Fillmore West (1971) Donny Hathaway - Live (1972) Baby Huey - The Baby Huey Story (1971) Various Artists - Wattstax (1973) Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1974) Marvin Gaye - What's Going On (1971) The Temptations - Masterpiece (1973) The Meters - Rejuvenation (1974) Miles Davis - Bitches Brew (1969) Miles Davis - A Tribute To Jack Johnson (1971) Miles Davis - On The Corner (1972) Weather Report - Black Market (1976) Jaco Pastorius - Jaco Pastorius (1976) Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters (1973) Herbie Hancock - Thrust (1974) Billy Cobham - Spectrum (1973)
- S_A_P 6y agoGreat list- I will add: Weather Report - Mysterious Traveler Quincy Jones - I Heard That (just because the breaks) Bob James - 1 through 4... Grover Washington Jr - Feels so good Cannonball Adderley - Love Sex and the Zodiac Cannonball Adderley - Soul Zodiac The Meters - Look-Ka Py Py
- always_swapping 6y agoYou must include Miles Davis - "Live - Evil" on that list! Other than that, I have some new albums to check out this weekend. Thanks for the list.
- smichel17 6y ago[Rock, not jazz] Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick (1971, I think) It was one of the first LPs that I would sit down and listen to back to back.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoBefore there was internet and Wikipedia I was taught "LP" stands for "long player". Each side of the record is expected to be listened to from start to finish, the sequence of songs is important. Not every album created in the LP-era was worthy of that, relatively few rose to the level of something like Bitches Brew. It was not the most efficient format, many albums having only 0-3 worthy tracks. Anyway, that, along with album cover art, seems like something we have progresively lost with the move to digital. The "LP" as an art form. It is interesting what you say about "not owning every album". That was why I used to borrow records from friends and record them. That whole process of making recordings and cataloging music by hand. Probably far fewer people doing that anymore. Exception perhaps being survival of the analog "mix tape" idea.
- httpsterio 6y agoit's just "long play" and it comes from the length of the album indeed. Same goes for EP (extended play) and single. When the groves in vinyl albums are made, the engineers can decide how close and deep the groves are and what RPM the album is supposed to be played at. Bass heavy tracks for example need deeper groves as they make the needle jump more and if the neighboring groves are too close, the needle might jump to them. This is why 12" vinyls come in different weights and the playtime can vary quite a bit.
- scrooched_moose 6y agoI think that's the main reason we prefer it. Sitting down and listening to an entire ~45 minute arrangement as the artist intended is a much difference experience than creating your "greatest hits" spotify playlist and jumping from singles from dozens of different artists.
- Thrymr 6y agoSpotify could make the album experience a lot better for users if they wanted to: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Music-Shuffle-by-Album/idi-p/18457 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Music-Shuffle-by...
- Shivetya 6y agoI have only four albums left over from my collecting heyday but I do have somewhere near two hundred CDs gathering dust. All were ripped ages ago but I am not even sure of the legality of disposing of them and keeping the ripped tracks.
- S_A_P 6y agoI had a similar path as yours, but maybe 2 years earlier I started stocking up on vinyl, as you could get entire lots of donated records from goodwill.com for pennies on the dollar. Classic Jazz, Soul, Funk and Fusion re-ignited my passion for records and now I have a few IKEA BESTAs full of 'wax'. Couple notes - - re-release vinyl is not as good these days, especially when clear or multi colored. - 180 gram vinyl is maybe a little better than yer average release from today, but the cheap pressings of the 60s and 70s (when well preserved) are much better than newer pressings. - That said, Im glad they are re-pressing stuff today as some original prints or early prints are hard to come by/expensive...
- criddell 6y agoIn the US and Canada, records from the late 1970's and into the 80's were usually pretty poor quality. Oil was expensive and so vinyl was often recycled and tracks were sometimes pushed together to make longer records. I would guess reprints of those records would fix those shortcomings.
- ilamont 6y agoThat's right. They were cheap and plasticky, often shoved in a cheap plastic liner rather than the old paper liners. I noticed that the new pressings of records from the 80s are far better now.
- ubermonkey 6y agoI think playing from CD or LP definitely puts you in a more intentional space for listening than dialing something up from your local server or a streaming service, but holy hell the convenience factor is enormous. Also, it's super unpopular to say so, but fidelity and dynamic range from an LP, even on a relatively fancy turntable, lags what you can get from CD or high-bitrate digital by a measurable margin. But hauling out the record is more fun. When we entertain -- or, when we WOULD do so, pre-COVID -- having guests pull out albums to play was a fun way to keep the music rolling. Excellent call on Bitches Brew, btw. -- I also wonder a bit as to your age. I'm 50, and when I grew up in the 80s the kids my age probably only had vinyl if they had music-fan parents or cool older siblings. Cassettes ruled the day for my cohort, and then pretty quickly CD was on the horizon so I remember consciously not buying my own copy of some things -- "Substance" by New Order comes to mind -- because I wanted to wait and have it on CD, and buying something twice is ridiculous. I didn't start enjoying vinyl until after the dot-com crash. An ex-roommate had left behind a turntable, and my girlfriend and I would sift through used record bins at thrift shops on weekends since you could get a stack of records for like $5 or $10. Super cheap entertainment!
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoI disagree with the premise that an experience is inherently more intentional because it's more laborious. When the last Tool album came out, there was an mp3 redemption code within the box of the physical album that I had preordered. I ended up using the mp3s to listen to the album for the first time (primarily because I have a nicer setup for my computer's audio than any CD player I have lying around), but it was still an "intentional" experience: I poured myself a drink, fired up ProjectM alongside the music player to give myself some graphical visualizations to look at while the album played (to keep myself from getting distracted), and routed the audio through a USB-DAC into my ATH-M50's. So that was 90 minutes of focused, uninterrupted listening, and it was done digitally. Intentional space is a result of, well...intention. The potential of a medium to allow for less-focused listening does not inherently cheapen that medium, much in the same way that the added labor of having to go open up my vinyl player and drop the needle onto a record does not inherently mean that I'm going to pay more attention to it once it starts going than if I had just clicked a button on an app somewhere.
- brazzy 6y ago> But the most important reason for me to buy records is to one day allow my daughter to discover this strange music from more than half a century ago that was always playing in the house when she was still young. Good luck trying to convince a teenager to have a listen at your Spotify playlist ;) Sorry to be a spoilsport, but chances are she'll never care, and that your expectation that she'll come to appreciate your musical tastes and your collection will be a burden to her more than anything else. She'll have her own life and her own tastes. Shared interests are great if they develop naturally, but they cannot be forced, and substantial collections very often end up only making the children feel guilty about disposing of them.
- pessimizer 6y agoMy mother's and grandfather's musical tastes were huge for me. Also two of my old girlfriends' tastes. We're not so atomized that the only influences we have in life are marketers and tabloids.
- simlevesque 6y agoMaybe she won't care, maybe she will. I'm forever grateful for my dad's records.
- brazzy 6y agoMaybe she will, but I find it unhealthy when that is "the most important reason for me to buy records".
- antfarm 6y ago> I'm forever grateful for my dad's records. Same here. And mom's. And cassettes.
- compiler-guy 6y agoMe too. I never listened to them, and in fact I got rid of them. But I took a list of them and added the ones I remembered with love to my own mp3 collection. This is one of the most tricky things about the modern digital age. It will be much harder for my children to go through my "papers" than it was for me to go through my father's papers.
- Theodores 6y agoThere is this movie called 'Threads' filmed in Sheffield for the BBC about nuclear war. Made back in the 1980's it has a scene in it with a record player that I can remember. The record player and records are not understood by the post-nuclear survivors, they don't know what it is for. It is a metaphor for culture and what it is to be human. Early 90's dance music was the soundtrack to my student life. The records of the 'rave era' didn't have much going on with the sleeves. Compared to the rock and roll records of the previous generation or guitar based 'Indie' music the sleeves were very different, you would be lucky to have 33 or 45 rpm written on the record correctly. Something had been lost in that the sleeve artwork didn't have the same value. However, the logo for the label (printed on the record's A-side label) did look cool rotating around at 33 or 45 rpm. Having an actual record player was not strictly necessary as, in student life, you would be somewhere else most evenings where 'decks' existed. I knew a few people who had the latest and most hard to obtain records but had no record player. They certainly didn't do tapes either. Records could be bought unheard by them in the store and played for the first time in a venue with the big speakers and a crowd. People could DJ that way, all their money in vinyl, nothing spent on audio kit and willing to subject unsuspecting victims to new music. In those days and in that genre it was £5 - £8 for a 12" single that would have one song and inevitable remixes. A £50 a week budget was reasonable on student means. Nowadays I can't imagine anyone paying that much for their music. CDs were available but the reasons for not buying them were many. The mixing thing was one factor, you couldn't play a CD at 'plus 8' (rpm) unless you bought one of those CD players for DJ things. But the most compelling reason not to buy the CD was that you wanted the limited pressing of a thousand vinyl from a small label, not the printed by the million CD from a major label. By the time the successful original vinyl made it from the small label to the big label (and on CD) music had in fact moved on. Plus the major labels somehow washed all life out of the music they published. Decks were important - Technics 1210's - but there was something cool about just having a basic record player that had no sophistication whatsoever, not even auto return. To get up, walk across the room, find the next track, swap the records over removing fluff from the needle and sit down again had something to it that you don't get with an mp3 player. The recall to find a song in a sizeable collection when all the sleeves were ambiguous was also a skill. There was also a certain amount of filing, putting everything back when every wall space had records stacked against it was inevitable tidying up after a good night. Returning to 'Threads' and where the world is going with C19, I worry about students today not being able to get their music the vinyl way at house parties. Having every song ever made on Spotify is great, particularly when you have Discogs, but the mystique has gone.