“Ah, vinyl. Specifically, polyvinyl chloride. Who can resist its myriad charms? You can press records on it, run sewage through it, and make a great outfit for your freaky sex slave from it. All three functions lend themselves to some brand of obsessive fetishism, but none more than the first. Well, maybe the third.”
“Anyway, I was born right at the tail end of the LP’s run of dominance. I remember being three or four and sitting around the turntable in the living room with my mom and my sister, listening to Hoyt Axton sing “Greenback Dollar.” I was blown away that he said the word “damn” in the chorus, and it touched off a desire to warble curses in song that I’m still working out of my system.
I remember trying to work the dulled chrome stack of knobby boxes in my grandma’s wood-paneled basement so my cousins and I could whirl in wild abandon to the intoxicating strains of “You Make My Pants Want to Get Up and Dance” by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. But these memories are primeval, origin myths loosely rooted in uneven soil. The concrete years of my childhood were filled with cassettes first, then CDs, and it was only sometime in my late teens or early twenties that vinyl reentered the scene.
I can’t say for sure what the first LP I bought was, but I think it was either the Stooges’ Raw Power or The Marble Index by Nico. Somehow, music’s physical dimensions were scaled up — it had real existence, it had blood and meat to it, its name was inscribed on the walls of plastic canyons in an arcane braille read aloud by the blind finger of the skittering needle. Of course, I was pretty high most of the time back then.
There’s something to it, though. The size of the packaging, the mechanism, it’s all tactile and involving where computers and CDs can feel abstract and remote. You’re not interfacing with the machinery, you’re operating it. You’re not hitting shuffle on your collection of 10,000 mp3s and letting it play in the background, you’re getting up every 15 minutes to flip the record — or not. You have choice, and power beyond the power to consume.
All formats have their place — records are useless in a car, they skip when your five year old dances by the turntable, etc. — but it’s the limitations of vinyl that make it attractive. It doesn’t do the work for you. It doesn’t fit in your pocket. It doesn’t stream in from heaven on the wings of your data package. You have to choose it.
Oh yeah, and it sounds better too.”
—Chris Senseney
Big Harp’s brand new release Chain Letters, the collaboration between married partners Chris Senseney and Stefanie Drootin-Senseney, is on your local store shelves now.
Enter to win a vinyl copy of Chain Letters by citing your favorite musical pairing in the comments below. We’ll choose one enlightened winner with a North American mailing address a week from today, 1/22.
