Vinyl or Digital? Hmmm.

It’s got to be vinyl.

Because we don’t need the Earth as much as we once so crucially depended on it.

I was very intellectually viewing a Vice video recently, in which the news was studied that Jack White (once a White Stripe) has purchased a vinyl record factory in Detroit, wherein he has a workforce devoted to bringing back about the tradition of music being heavier in the hand.

Throughout the interview, White gave his reasons for this endeavour, citing the enormous sales of vinyl in the UK and how music audiences have tired of the “invisibility” of music.

White also mentioned that folk liked moving mechanical parts to their music; which is nice.

I can see the appreciation of vinyl being a visible pleasure, for it was the same when I first purchased my first cd; Blood Sugar Sex Magic by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The album art system is lost, with the purchased song now having the visible identity of a postage-stamp sized irrelevance in the corner of your screen.

Whilst one could claim that this gives the audience no illusions other than the sheer product of music itself; album art was and can be tremendous.

With Warhol and The Velvet Underground having the audacity to bend minds with a banana, the ludicrously luscious lips (even the tongue is still swaggering) of the Rolling Stones and world starting Big Bang of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (by the Beatles; a local Liverpool based group); these album covers gave an added appropriate kick in the teeth to authority and kick in the arses to those young folk whose attention had yet to be garnered.

Memorable to the mind, and our first contact with the album; the cover art mattered and it still can as it gives the artist another dimension the express and the audience an added bud to with which to taste.

The theme of dimensions plays again when regarding the idea of making music “heavier in the hand”.

The song you’ve downloaded from ITunes, is THE song. You’ve got it and so do your companions.

With the vinyl album, just as it was for me when I bought my first cd; what you hold in your hand is now YOURS.

That’s YOUR Appetite for Destruction. That’s MY Are You Experienced.

Of course, one’s chums had it too, only theirs was theirs, whilst yours was yours.

The album would be clenched to the strangling point of anticipation whilst you listened for the first time, studied diligently and blindly stared at as it revolved in ones hands as you felt what the songs gave you to feel or found a feeling within you.

YOURS.

MINE.

I can tell because it’s in my hand. Yours is in yours.

As well as this, there is the factor of also listening to this music, should you care to.

“Crisp”, “clear”, “acute”, “sharp”, “sterile”, “cutting” – All words describing why you should purchase the latest model of audio technology.

“Cold” is another and is, for me, the definition of digital sound in so far as a pleasure.

It has a place, of course, with Metal and certain Dance and Techno tunes, but people are drifting towards the future of vinyl for the welcoming, wistful “warmth” that it breathes.

A pleasing, deep groove of a song comes from the speaker of a turntable. The familiarity of sound that resonates like that of ones father coming home from work whilst your mother was reading and you were really rather busy in the womb.

The sound of ‘next door underwater’ has, in my thoughts, a direct link to our first hearings from within mum’s tum; a resonance from before you were born.

That’s quite a selling point.

Why choose vinyl?

Because of this, that, and the other; especially those last three.

It’s also tall and wide and round and it spins, all highly pleasing attributes to most physical things and a record is no exception.

The flaw in the proud procession along the groove of vinyl’s victory parade over digital music is that leads to the inevitable and irreversible end of the Earth.

It is a physical thing, and physical things take up space about the planet.

They require a great deal of energy to create and distribute, both of which cause ice shelves to melt as quickly as teenage hearts to a sweet pop melody.

A vinyl record can be found lodged in the corpse of a once highly determined and regrettably dense seagull or tortoise, who took to biting and swallowing once the young chap on the brow of the boat impressed everyone immensely by demonstrating just how well a vinyl record could fly with the correction application of “spin”.

Sharpened well, a vinyl record could be the weapon of choice; whilst the digitally downloaded song is notably omitted from current editions of Cluedo as a method of murder.

And so the Earth will close for business and eternity; awash in seas of plastic discs and enormous and quality album art.

It’s a good thing Mars has all but invited us to call in soon.

I’ll pack in advance I think…must remember to bring my IPod.

Sam.