Vinyl (The Hipster Post)

It’s been a few months since my last post. Life forced me to focus on other things, but it’s good to be back here blogging once more for the three family members who take the time to read these posts.

So a few months ago despite mental warnings from a black-faced Robert Downy Jr. to avoid going “Full Hipster” I bought a record player.

In true hipster fashion I’m now going to try to justify why I’m totally not a hipster despite my new retro listening device and stupid hat addiction.

I didn’t buy the thing because I’m an audiophile. Yes, as Neil Young is more then happy to point out we did lose something in sound quality when we switched over to digital formats, but you need a killer speaker system to even tell the difference. I’ve just got an old used Peavey guitar amp I picked up a guitar center for 15 bucks.

Additionally, I didn’t buy the player to show off my rad record collection to my friends. For one thing absolutely none of my friends give a damn about records, for another I’m too poor to buy special edition color vinyl or limited press Hendrix bootlegs. My collection has crept up to about 30 records at this point and about 70% came out of the dollar bin at my local record store.

The other 30% are from bands that I care about and I want to support, which brings me to my first reason for buying this badge of hipsterdom. In a world where most of us download nearly of what we listen to, it’s important to make an effort to support artists we believe in. When I buy a record by My Morning Jacket or The White Buffalo I’m basically financing their next project and hopefully their next tour. (Seriously MMJ I was in the desert the last two times you came through Colorado, please come back!)

The second reason I bought a record player is much simpler and way more selfish… I honestly can’t get any work done when listening to iTunes on my computer. Seriously iTunes is like the opposite of Ritalin. I sit down to write a paper or a blog post and the next thing I know I’ve spent 45 minutes making playlists and another 20 trying to download music I thought I already had. So records are good. Records don’t leach half of my day away. There’s no skipping tracks, or digging though the archives for that one song you forgot the name of.

And yes, I suppose you could do the same thing with CDs, but lets face it, the first thing we all do with a new CD is put it in in computer, upload the tracks to iTunes and promptly lose it.

Plus there’s the added benefit that my dog, Abby, loves records too!

To be clear, I don’t have a vendetta against other listening formats. I still download the bulk of my music. It’s the best way I know to learn about new bands, and to be honest no matter how good Lorde’s album is, buying electronic based music on vinyl seems kind of silly to me. (Not to mention, she really doesn’t need my help.) In the car and I use my iPod or even CDs, but for my money live music is the best. Still there’s something comforting about the ritual and tradition of playing records.