Nostalgia for a forgotton age!

I was reading through some past posts from fellow blogger and Alesis Fusion sound developer Roberto and came across this touching little story:(http://failedmuso.blogspot.com/2007/07/are-friends-electric-in-ukelele-stylee.html)

The thing that prompted this post was his quote about listening to records:

We sat around the record player with a stack of records. Kids today have no idea about this ritual. Nowadays it's all MP3's and playlists. Back in 1979, we had a mono record player and 7" vinyl.

Anyway, reading that I was reminded of my own youth. obviously, being a Techno-geek and lifelong audiophile, we didn't sit around any mono record players, oh no, we sat around HI FI SYSTEMS that we had spent all of our disposable incomes scraping together and actually building from old parts or kits from the likes of Sinclair!

But I digress. That will be the subject, I am sure of another post down the line. The thing is my friends and I, we shared our music. I don't mean we taped each other's records (the precursor to file sharing), but listening to music was a sociable activity.

Defining moments in my teenage years can be measured by the releases of my favorite records. I can remember actually which shop I bought many of my records. I can remember the day it happened. Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Yes's Relayer, Genesis' Wind and Wuthering, to name but a few

Actually putting the record on was elevated to the status of ritual. Taking the LP out of it's cover, and then sliding it gently out of the inner-sleeve so that the edge rested on the skin between outstretched thumb and forefinger, the middle finger supporting the record on the label. (Absolutely no touching the playing surface! That would after all have been some kind of heresy). Then transferring from this one handed balancing act to one where the record was held between the middle fingers of each hand and the pad of each thumb, again only making contact with the edges of the record...

Wait. You have no idea what I'm talking about do you? In fact I'd lay bets most of you haven't even touched a vinyl record in your lives.


OK... Look. You hold it like this.





OK?

So... Back to the ritual. Holding the LP like in the picture, you place it on the already revolving platter, and then placed the arm over the start of the record and pushed the lever down to gently lower the stylus into the groove. (If you were a true aficionado, you would eschew the damped lever and manually lower the stylus to the groove)

And then we would proceed to listen to our music.

I'll repeat that. And then we would listen to our music. It wasn't on in the background, it wasn't the accompaniment to some other activity. It was the activity.

So life has moved on. The LP has largely been superseded by the CD and that in itself has given way, more or less to the digital download (watch this space for a rant about that by the way!). These days, MP3s are the medium, and if there is any listening to be done, it's a solitary activity. And nearly always its just the soundtrack to some other thing.

Perhaps I'm hopelessly out of touch, but somehow I can't help but feel that we've lost something. Perhaps the music business is in terminal decline not because the music is any worse (there is always good and bad music), but because music in of itself has become an add-on optional extra in the lives of today's young consumer generation.

I can remember that it wasn't that unusual to have to queue up on the release day of your favorite band's latest album. It was a special moment rushing home with a gate-fold 12" sleeve containing your hero's latest masterpiece. Now it's there at a click on iTunes, there is no real sense of ownership and anyway, chances are, you aren't going to listen to it.

You might hear it in the background while something else takes your attention. But for a great many, the defining moments in their lives simply don't equate to the release of an album.

And that's just a little sad. Isn't it?