Face The Music
By Mitch Berg
B-Hub at Yucky Salad misses record stores:
I haven’t been in a record store in over three years now. There’s no point. Who’s going to spend 18 bucks on a cd with two or three good songs when you can just buy those songs for two bucks? I don’t miss buying records, but I do miss record stores– everything about them– the people, the vibe, even the smell. I miss going into The Electric Fetus and buying something cool like “Hang Time” and having the punk rock girl ringing me up giving me an approving glance as if to say, “hmmm, maybe I mis-judged you jock-boy” and I also miss buying something like Bon Jovi and having the same punk rock girl give me a dismissive look that screamed “go date-rape a cheerleader, jock-boy”– I loved both looks and I miss them.
Truth be told, I have never really liked digital music. Oh, it’s convenient, and it’s brought back the single which is a wonderful thing – but the CD always sounded way to clinically-clean and teutonic to me. And ever since all three stages of recorded music (recording, mastering and playback) have gone from analog to digital, it’s all felt cold and heartless to me.
And record stores? I used to love the feeling you’d get when you’d talk the totally-wasted stoner behind the counter into playing some sample on the house stereo; sliding the record out, dropping the needle, the anticipation as the record rolled toward the start…
And Katie sounds off:
Bill is trying to pretend he isn’t that character from High Fidelity, and he so it that character. He’s if that character and Nick Hornby had a baby. Also, I hate that sone from Hinder so much I wish it was a rabbit so I could kill it with a shotgun.
And the crowd goes wild!
Katie also settles a bet or two:
And no, I’m not dead, I’m just in hiding.- Katie
Sure, I was worried.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:31 am
Meetovitch, font thingy went all tiny….
May 24th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Me, I miss “albums”.
CD’s are fine, and I’m definitely not going to pretend I can hear the difference between a CD and an LP, aside from, say, needle pop.
No, I’m talking about this idea that instead of buying a complete work you just buy the one song that you like. I can’t even begin to imagine how many songs I would have missed out on that I worship and adore now.
Yes, there’s indisputably a move toward putting out a 10-song CD on the strength of 1 soon-to-be crappy hit. But I think lots of people are putting out ALBUMS, groups of songs that all deserve or at least are intended to be heard together.
That’s how my Ipod stays full – I almost never put an individual track on it. That’s also how my Emusic allotment runs out right at the start of every month.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:30 am
I would love to conduct an analog vs digital test to see if you could tell the difference Mitch.
Yes, I know all about analog being “warmer” but come on…
It’s audiophile BS if you ask me.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Ahhh… I miss seeing movies at theaters on film. I miss all the visible scratch marks and hairs I could see when i watched the movie. Oh, and the audio occasionally popping. That was awesome. Today watching a clean and amazing crisp picture in 1080i resolution with my 6.1 surround sound system at home on my soft plush couch just seems so sanitized and sterile. I miss the gum and candy stuck to the floor and the smelly seats. Oh, and don’t get me started on people behind you sneezing on you. Boy, those were the days!
May 24th, 2007 at 11:14 am
I would love to conduct an analog vs digital test to see if you could tell the difference Mitch
As a rule? Probably not. It’s just a generality. Compare stuff recorded today to, say, Stax/Volt records – recorded on 2, 4 or 8 tracks in a Big Room – though. Technology is no substitute for great technique.
It’s audiophile BS if you ask me.
And I’m not only not an audiophile – I’m probably the opposite. My favorite production is the stuff that was mixed to sound good on AM car radio speakers.
And that, I CAN tell – but that’s not an “audiophile” thing.
May 24th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
I much prefer vinyl. Prerecorded CDs are for the birds. There’s a nice record show every couple months or so at the uptown area VFW. http://www.mnrecordshow.com/
One of the main reasons I moved to mpls was the awesomeness that was Let It Be.
Man, I miss that place…
May 24th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
jb: I would love to conduct an analog vs digital test to see if you could tell the difference Mitch
It’s audiophile BS if you ask me.
There’s a huge difference, jb: Digital has phase-angle distortion. The phase angle of a sound is what allows you to determine where a sound comes from–to the left, to the right, behind, above, below, in front.
Analog preserves the spatial relationship between the instruments, even if those instruments are separately recorded on a multiple-track system. Digital always flattens the sound so that it seems to be coming everywhere at once–somewhat like the difference between mono and stereo.
This is why I have a love-hate relationship with Pro Tools; while there are effects that cannot be accomplished otherwise, the resulting distortion annoys me. And I’m not alone in this. Magazines like Guitar Player have been debating Analog vs. Digital for years, so it’s not audiophile BS.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Mitch: My favorite production is the stuff that was mixed to sound good on AM car radio speakers.
Then you must have loved Berry Gordy, who made his engineers and producers mix those Supremes, Four Tops and Temptations songs on transistor radio speakers set at low volume for that very reason.
May 25th, 2007 at 1:15 am
I miss album art. It was tactile, something to read over and talk about, and if you were geeky you propped it up and displayed it while the music played. I kept the brown paper sleeve that “In Through the Out Door” came in for as long as I had the album. But I do love the fact that CDs are much easier to move with than albums.
For something slightly different, but still music-related, you often write about Richard Thompson and he will be at the Fitzgerald in June.
May 25th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Lori hit on something I thought of when I first read Mitch’s post…the album art. I still have the lyrics insert from the inside of Neil Young’s “Harvest” whereon a friend drew something psychedelic and (now) corny, (but it was the 70’s!) and signed his name and address to so I would be able to write to him after I moved from Colorado to MN. I s’pose you could do that to a CD liner, but not so big and elaborate!
Think of studying the album cover for Jim Hendrixs’ Axis…if you were looking at the teensy CD version you’d never bother looking at any of it.