By: Ben
Johnson
So apparently Amazon is getting
into vinyl these days. “Yeah, man, I’ve been getting really into vinyl
these days,” says Amazon. “Nothing beats the feeling you get when you open up a
record sleeve, pull that thing out, put it on the turntable, put the needle
down, and just bask in the warm, warm, tonal warmth of sound and consumerist
smugness you get from knowing you own the thing you’re currently listening to.”
I like records. I have way more of them than I
need. I understand the pathology. I don’t blame Amazon for getting into the
vinyl game. It’s still, somehow, a growth
industry. And Amazon already sells
the most vinyl. They might as well get involved in the front end, too.
Sure. Why not?
There are five titles now available for
pre-sale as “Amazon.com Exclusives.” If you like to click on hyperlinks, you
already know that they are Soundtracks of 80’s movies. Footloose,
Top
Gun, Rocky
IV, Dirty
Dancing, and Goonies, to be
precise. If you don’t like hyperlinks, the movie titles I just listed are
linked to pages in Discogs where the respective soundtrack albums are available
for sale for anywhere between significantly and way, way less than the $25
Amazon is charging for its “exclusive” reissues. The Goonies soundtrack is apparently actually kind of hard to find.
Other than that, though, from purely a supply and demand perspective, these
vinyl reissues of 80’s movie soundtracks do not need to exist.
Also from a musical perspective, which I
understand is subjective, these titles, objectively, fucking suck.
So yeah: these “Amazon.com Exclusives” are
exclusively for stupid people. You know, the kind of people who would pay extra
money for some patently unnecessary thing that isn’t even good in the first
place just because it’s on Amazon and not a different website. Morons.
Mouth-breathing dipshits on a misguided cross-platform nostalgia kick, the kind
that see a thing that reminds them of another thing and say the word “awesome” using
more than two syllables. People for whom comprehension is out of the question,
and therefore must satisfy themselves with mere dim recognition. Suckers, in
other words.
Which, okay, separating a sucker from their
money is not exactly the worst thing you can do. I got no beef with Amazon over
that. Anybody who’s bone-stupid and profligate enough to spend $25 on an “exclusive”
reissue of the Top Gun soundtrack
deserves to be ripped off continually until they’re forced to wander the globe
in a potato sack. That’s not the issue I take with this.
The issue is this: the infrastructure
doesn’t exist to accommodate every market-researched sucker-baiting whim of
monolithic entities like Amazon AND manufacture all the other records that regular
human non-corporation people would also like to have exist. Amazon is throwing
its considerable heft and weight into
a bottleneck, and it’s not hard to get a case of the logical extension willies
from the resultant squeeze. If this works, if people buy these things, then
this will be a major step towards total corporate dominance of the vinyl record
medium, and therefore a sizable chunk of our communal participatory culture.
But who cares, right? I get that what I appear
to be actually upset about is a thinly veiled elitist impulse to shit all over
anything that intrudes on my ivory tower of perfect taste, which itself
represents a hierarchy of my choosing not unlike the monetary hierarchy I’m
decrying which Amazon sits atop. I get that vinyl is an inherently bourgeois
medium. I get that just because I personally like records, and like listening
to recorded music on records, doesn’t mean that I should expect that to always
be feasible. I understand that records aren’t the only way to listen to music. I
realize that the fact that I can even afford to have the number of records I currently
own means that I, and I’ll go so far as to say a straight white cis man,
because why not go ahead and mention it, am currently standing on 90% of the
world’s neck. I am fully aware that nobody should care what I think.
BUT: I think it’s slowly but
surely going to be damn near impossible to find and afford an actual good
record. And I think that’s a shame in the same way it is always a shame when
people, and here is where I count myself among people and stand up for myself a
little bit, are robbed of an experience they enjoy simply because they have
been disqualified from that experience by the larger forces of commerce,
especially when that experience is one their enthusiasm helped popularize.
I can’t say why other people get into records,
but I can say why I did: because listening to a record I love makes me feel less
alone in the world. Crowds bug me. People make me uncomfortable. Most of the
time, I don’t even understand what most people are saying or why they’re saying
it. And yet when I put on a record I love, and crank that fucker up, I feel
NONE of that.
I also like records because there’s the fact of
it. The object. Physical evidence that other people are like me and want to
hear the same sounds as I do. You go out into the world, and the experience is
terrifying and upsetting, and all these people are out there in it just farting
their way loudly through your shared space, seemingly unburdened by any sense
of basic human sensitivity. And one of the things out there in this world,
astonishingly, is some magic artifact of a weird person you are free to think
is like you in some ways who has seen fit to skronk out their similarly
displaced emotions and press them into a small platter you can hold in your
hand, a miraculously available thing for you to go out into THIS WORLD and get.
I have records, and I can look at them and play them whenever I want, and more
importantly, I can feel them keeping me company, telling me that I’m okay, and
that my emotions are both real and shared, and it helps.
I’m not going to say that this is entirely healthy.
I could probably benefit from more viably alive sources of emotional support
than my record collection.
Be that as it may, I do have a tendency to take
it personally when something happens in the world of records and record
production which runs counter to my own wishes and which pushes my tastes and
preferences further to the margins I already feel myself inhabiting, even while
acknowledging that as a straight white cis male any margins I feel myself
confined to are way, way roomier than most.
I’ve read enough to suppose that the thrust of our
current economy exerts a similarly marginalizing force on all of us, whether we
are aware of it or not. It’s immensely sad to me that many of us, in our own
personal search for happiness and meaning in the world, don’t know any better
than to spend $25 on a Top Gun
soundtrack LP.
Even more sad: there will probably be many people
who receive these “Amazon.com Exclusive” LPs as a gift this upcoming holiday
season from well-meaning loved ones who only know that the person they care
about is “into vinyls, like records, like a record record, like wigga wigga, a
record” and form the thought “I just know you like that movie from when we watched
it together that time in 1993 when we seemed temporarily not all that estranged,”
and this gift will be at once sincere and beautiful and heartbreakingly,
traumatically insufficient. Much in the same way that both the product itself
and the negative space of not some other product is also those things.
And so I urge you to please not buy these
things. These are bad things that do not need to exist. If you insist upon
owning these things, buy them used. Please. This is an honest request from a
fellow human being. I’m sorry I called you a sucker and implied that you are a basic,
dirt-fucking clod who could make the world a better place simply by dying in a
boat wreck. That’s not about you, that’s just me barfing my hang-ups out onto
you. Please forgive me.
You’re into Kenny Loggins, that’s fine with me.
I respect that. Please respect that I am into NOT Kenny Loggins. I may be
wrong, but I feel that I am more delicate and vulnerable than you are on the
Kenny Loggins issue, and therefore I need NOT Kenny Loggins more than you need $25
Amazon Exclusive reissued Kenny Loggins. Hey, how about this: give me $25, and
I will bring you all the Loggins LPs you can handle, plus a J.J. Cale record
that’s like Kenny Loggins but actually good. I’d gladly do this for you. Please
at least consider it. For once in your life.
