In my opinion, music news is slow near the end of the year. There are painful Grammy Nominations to spray with verbal bullets, There is Bob Dylan's new Xmas album to decimate, and every day Lady Gaga's attempt via costume to hide her butterface get more grandiose and forced...but why bother going into depth with the obvious?
Even though I'm not really a music news blogger, I do my best to cherry pick the best bits and spit out the pits. But I think I'm just going to have fun and dig deep to find items that fulfill my fancy until I do my best and worst of 2009 lists in a week or so.
Today I found a snippet of a film called The Archive, by Sean Dunne about a man in Pittsburgh who claims to have the world's largest record collection. Here's a 4 minute clip. This makes me want to go get that stylus that I've needed for 16 years, and maybe back away from the Ipod a little.
Couldn't we all chip in, set up a Pay Pal account in his name and buy this sucker? We could empty out a Best Buy near one of our homes and keep it there. We could charge all of people a dollar and a half just to see 'em. And for an extra 50 cents, anyone 21 or under gets to actually hold an LP..maybe get their picture taken with it.
Maybe the problem is that when prospective buyers watch the film, they freak out when he holds the OLDEST RECORD KNOWN TO MAN with his fingers all over the grooves. You hold records by the edges, people! Keeps your greasy grease palms from cloggin up the grooves. Sheesh. Anyone knows that. I think I am getting one of those UBS turntables for Christmas so I can move all of my old Gerry Rafferty albums and the War of the World soundtrack to my iPod. yeah baby.
ReplyDeleteI live comfortably between the two worlds. Though I find myself putting on records quite a bit. I have a lot of vinyl (not as much as Wilfred Brimley in that video) that never made the transition to the digital world. With those that did, it's pretty cool to compare formats.
ReplyDeleteHaving grown up with records and cassettes, it seemed like a giant leap forward when CDs first became available. Then I noticed that quite a bit seemed to go missing when I listened to them. Digital sounds are clean and quite dry. By removing the pesky "noise" that people thought they were hearing in analog recordings, we also lost fidelity. I like to hear Bonham's bass drum pedal squeak, because you are also hearing the natural sound of the room talking back to him as he plays. It's a conversation and with CD's were missing a lot of what's being said.
I could go on, but I know that I'm preaching to the choir.
Uncle Neil said it best: "Digital is like standing under the shower and being hit by icy needles, while analog just washes right over you."
I'm about to butcher this quote that i just read somewhere- But I think my recollection of it will get the point across.
ReplyDeleteIt goes something like:
Listening to an analog recording is the equivalent of seeing the Mona Lisa in person, hearing the same recording digitized is like seeing a picture of the Mona Lisa on a postage stamp.
Geez, I was expecting some cool older dude with a long gray beard and one earring to own the world's biggest collection. I think this guy likes the collection more than the actual music...I like your idea. Lets get his stuff and start a museum and we can have a stage so cool bands could drop by and play, like The Crooked Vultures, Bang Camaro and Uncle Neal.
ReplyDelete