Vinyl Elvis

Hm, I need to stop thinking about how badly the Wizards are playing in the playoffs. Because they are playing very, very, very BADLY. It’s killing me. But I can’t blog about that, it’s really too painful.

So yesterday Elvis Costello released his latest album as vinyl only (though there is a promise of a CD version to come out later). It’s interesting to watch the reaction of the fans, because two things become clear: (1) both he and many of his fans possess a huge, I might even say irrational, love for vinyl LPs; and (2) I don’t.

I suppose there’s a reason one refers to the formative years as being, well, formative. During mine, there was one record player in the house, and it was smack in the living room. And the floor in there was incredibly susceptible to vibrations, so if you wanted to listen to a record you had to announce your intention so that everybody could sneak around and not make the record skip. The implication of this is that playing music in record form was not in any way a private activity, even with headphones. So if it hadn’t been for the cassette tape, I wouldn’t have had any freedom to listen to whatever I wanted, or to give the music the kind of undivided attention that music sometimes demands. (Or to get emotional when the music demanded that you got emotional.) This set of circumstances also means I never had the magic moment of putting a needle down on a record to hear it the first time, and so I don’t have a desire to recapture this with Elvis’s new one. (I also don’t have an audiophilic passion for the topic of fidelity, but that might be worth a whole post of its own.) But I can’t fault Elvis for engineering that experience anew for a lot of people who find that important, so that’s cool. Although he’d better put the damn album out on CD too, dammit.

Through a strange coincidence I also watched the movie High Fidelity for the first time last weekend, and of course it’s awash in record-store geekery and nostalgia for the vinyl. God, how I wanted a summer job in a record store when I was younger. It’s probably for the best that I was never granted such a platform where I could feel cooler than the rest of the world, heh. But as a mini-review I’ll say that I wasn’t super impressed with the book, and the movie didn’t work any better. For a John Cusack plus Tim Robbins flick, I would definitely watch Tapeheads a few more times rather than see this one again. (Heh, according to the IMDB rating I am in the minority opinion there!) And for John Cusack directed by Stephen Frears, for the love of Pete you should totally go with The Grifters—much better.

Think there’s any chance the Wizards won’t get swept? Aaaaargh.