All week, the TVD NOLA will be presenting the musings of singer/songwriter Stephanie Nilles. Her music has been described as, “Ella Fitzgerald on speed beating the shit out of Regina Spektor.”
Stephanie will share some music, an interview with one of her favorite local musicians, and some insight into the music scene in other cities.
“It was in a Cleveland basement dive during college that I first heard a man speak the words, “Whereas the velocity of the spinning vinyl, cross-faded, spun backwards, and re-released at the same given moment of recorded history, yet at a different moment in time’s continuum, has allowed history to catch up with the present.” Saul Williams has long been an inspiration of mine, not only because he is a brilliant poet, but because, in the face of laptops and Twitter and flat-screen TVs, he is one of the resolute and relative few who gather people together to do something ancient.
My relationship with vinyl—and I think the relationships of most music lovers with vinyl—follows. Our longing to collect records is less about the experience of holding a collector’s item in our hands or hearing the crackle of the plastic grooves against the needle, and more about our effort to medicate the symptoms of an unseen and seldom talked-about disease. We are tired of machines.
We are nostalgic for authentic exploration, discovery, sensibility, and artistry. We miss the experience of bearing witness to performers who can stand alone in a room, having so mastered their craft, that we can’t help but be transfixed by their presence alone. We miss Motown, the day in which some of these performers were captured onto tape, not by a producer who tracks drums then bass then guitar then ukulele then vocals then baritone sax and a voice-over of Gil-Scott Heron then proceeds to digitally doctor a “sound, man,” with the cunning use of a keyboard and a mouse, but by an engineer who positioned microphones in a room and got the fuck out of the way. I’m convinced it’s that Motown sound, and all the sounds that came before it, that the resurgence of vinyl is trying to recreate.
When I put on a Count Basie record while I make my coffee on a Sunday morning, or a record of Stevie Wonder, or Schubert, or Bessie Smith, or The Black Keys, I am repeatedly reminded of the fact that there is much that came before me, and therefore much that will come after. That I am delightfully insignificant. That, regardless of the time frame of the past I am experiencing in sonic snapshot, or the present in which it is playing itself out yet again, people will always make records. And people will always listen to records.
The vinyl revolution isn’t really about analog vs. digital. It’s not about vintage vs. modern, or hipster vs. mainstream, or aesthetic vs. entertainment. It isn’t even really about music. It’s giving voice to what I hope will give way to a more substantial cultural movement. One that is based on the axiom that technology is fleeting; that humanity, in all of its complexity and vanity and beauty and absurdity, is paramount.”
