In the late 1980s, I used to go out with a hoarder. He specialized in useless popular cultural ephemera. This was the period when compact discs warped the music industry with a clinical, digital speed of change that destroyed the black magic of vinyl.
I have poignant memories of walking into electrical stores and seeing customers being shown into the new secular vestibule – ‘the sound proof compact disc room’ – where over-eager techno-thrilled salesmen would ritualistically slot Dire Straits Alchemy into the new equipment. While we can mock the fetishization of the shiny sound clarity now – particularly since our fickle desires have passed to stark white headphones, small screens and flywheels – it is important to remember how our sonic literacies transformed when we first heard that sharp edge of digital music.
Needless to say, my former boyfriend never lost his love for the superceded. Probably that is why he went out with me: I looked like a cross between ‘get into the groove Madonna’ and ‘Love Cats Robert Smith.’ Through the eyeliner and the lace gloves, he remained a vinyl purist, a High Fidelity obsessional that worshipped the rare and the odd. Most importantly, he was also a completionist.
On one Sunday morning, we were scouring second-hand record shops to complete his collection of Ultravox albums. As we investigated a hidden building between a butcher and pub, a Dickens-like shop keeper leered from a darkened store room. He was balding, with a few dark strands framing his pasty face. He was bitter and sleepless because his new ‘relationship’ that he had hoped to commence the night before ended during pre-dinner drinks. He could only look accusingly at me to snarl, “women are really hard work. They are bitches. The lot of em.”
Women were indeed much harder work than collecting vinyl it seemed. His stock tumbled from every shelf, covering the floor and was piled around his front counter. In short, the shop was stacked with the dumped residues of all those shifting allegiances to shiny discs. Second hand record shops became sad places where bitter single men, wanna-be DJs and obsessive collectors spent time flicking through the racks, mourning at the loss of crackling pauses between tracks.
I was reminded of this odd moment in popular cultural history when watching the transformations to music in the last few years through the switchover to MP3. Pop history is often cyclical, not linear. It was only a matter of time before vinyl records would revenge their redundancy.
The speed and ruthlessness of the compact disc’s death is appropriate. A friend of mine – who has a nasty habit of going out with married men – was dumped by a bloke in a particularly nasty text message. I was there when it arrived. She could only raspily confirm through the shock that, “how you get a bloke is how you lose them.” Similarly, how the compact disc gained its popularity would also signal how it would also be lost.
But through the death of the disc, one more throw of the dice was coming. In the last few years, beautifully produced compact disc collections – often bound with a DVD, photographs and glossy booklet – have try to lure the collectors to remain loyal to the loser in the joust over formats.
In the age of digital compression, the only ‘value’ of physical musical platforms is if they are part of a package of both sound and vision. Like DVD extras, there must be reasons to buy a popular cultural artefact, rather than download, borrow, steal or rent it. Startling box sets have emerged in the last two years. Billy Bragg produced a two volume collection of all his previous albums, plus a ‘bonus’ DVD within each pack. It was distributed by the ironically titled Cooking Vinyl. Similarly, after the success of 24 hour party people, Joy Division’s back catalogue was gathered in Heart and Soul, featuring the ever-present booklet of disturbing photographs of the even more disturbing Ian Curtis. The justification of (yet) another repackaging of the band was that “Joy Division have a small but hitherto awkwardly compiled catalogue. The basic idea was to tidy up all the outtakes and single releases … It was decided to edit down the unissued/rare material for reasons of space and quality.” In other words, the already available albums have been re-released (again), with a few oddities for the collectors (again).
Through the death rattles of the disc, some beautiful popular cultural artefacts have been repackaged and recycled. The Byrds There is a Season is a four disc retrospective of their career, featuring a DVD (obviously) and a booklet (of course). There is something evocative in hearing the melancholic ringing of the 12 string Rickenbacker while viewing the past through the blue lens of Roger McGuinn’s granny glasses. The appropriately named Legacy Records was responsible for this profound testament to a band that covered Dylan’s songs but stretched far beyond the master’s harmonic capacities.
While McGuinn is a guitarist who rang the changes between finger picking styles, one of the greatest guitarists of all time has – at least retrospectively – been properly recognized through box sets. Cooking Vinyl (again) featured Richard Thompson’s 1000 years of popular music. Accompanied by Judith Owen and Debra Dobkin, the legendary renaissance man/guitarist demonstrated the breadth and diversity of ‘popular’ music. His versions of ‘Blackleg miner,’ ‘There is beauty in the bellow of the blast’ – from The Mikado – and the extraordinary ‘Friday on my mind’ are remarkable restampings of the originals. The DVD (obviously) and the booklet (of course) offer a tight and complex journey through one man’s ability in musical history. Even more expansive is Free Reed’s Revival Masters, featuring six compact discs on Thompson’s career and a 172-page tale of his life and work. Indeed, the complex musical journey of Thompson requires the spectrum of box sets to capture even a small part of his talent, breadth and knowledge.
There is an archival function of these box sets, providing a context and narrative history unattainable in the smash, grab and download culture of MP3s. Perhaps the greatest of these box sets is not only a testament to the compact disc, but to vinyl’s history. For size and grandeur, The Band: A Music History is much more than a six disc set. In fact, the music is hidden at the back of the package. Filling out the size of a vinyl album, the hardback ‘book’ features both pictures and closely written text. The scale and majesty is not wasted on The Band. Adored by music critics, but misunderstood or forgotten by fans, it is a/the band for the creepy guys with comb overs who used to run second hand record shops.
Formed by Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko, they gained their start with Ronnie Hawkins but fame through Bob Dylan’s 1965-66 world tour and the recordings that became The Basement Tapes. Their legacy though would be their own, through the two albums that moved music out of the choking-on-your-own-vomit death rattle of the 1960s into the ‘take it easy’ seventies. Music from Big Pink and The Band were their extraordinary first two albums, featuring songs that swept through American history. ‘The night they drove old Dixie down’ and ‘King harvest has surely come’ were not only founding tracks of the country rock genre, but captured drama and tragedy of the rural south.
The Band’s box set conveys the complexity of a musical history that will never be understood through the ephemera of digitization. The whiteness of the ipod results in a compressed – jump cut – history without the linearity of tracks or the complex dialogue between album covers and the enclosed music. The High Fidelity lads can now fetishize the box sets like they used to worship to authenticity of vinyl.
The compact disc – like the redundant black spinning discs before it – has changed its function and audience. It can never be as portable as MP3 players. It can never be as convenient. It can never be as small. Through these box sets – and to find a place and role in the market – the compact disc has got larger, cannibalizing the rock biography, photographic collections, music videos and DVD documentaries to become physical, tactile and sensual tributes to the music history of the past. Now that the compact disc has become a vault, we are free to welcome the light, compressed, non linear future of pop.
