Rituals of Vinyl

Stephen Janis
 A t Morphius, the Baltimore-based
record label and distributor where I work, the vinyl comes in waves. Not
literally, in petroleum tsunamis, but in hundreds of brown boxes deliv-
ered daily by the UPS driver, loaded into the shipping department and
unpacked—to be sold by me, a “store” salesman, disk pusher, the next-
to-final stop for a product that fills our warehouse.
In our daily shipment, we receive several hundred 45s, colored
black and opaque blue. Triple gatefold, 180- and 220-gram, audiophile
re-mastered albums featuring dead jazz musicians and defunct but still
legendary rock bands.1 There is a box of blue heart-shaped records
from a band called Lynrds Innards, and a buzz-saw-blade limited edition
disk that looks sharp enough to cut through its plastic sleeve. Piles of
five-, ten-, and twelve-inch disks sit in walls of vinyl stacked next to the
shipping table. There’s a special 45 rpm Tiara series that comes with a
Mexican Tarot card precariously glued to a silk-screened jacket. And of
course there is our most vaunted item, a cultural talisman coveted, even
worshiped, by the small subculture that constitutes my customer base:
the limited edition picture disk, a piece of vinyl imprinted with artwork,
yet playable all the same.
And today, as I sit at my desk, I hold in my hands a real gem, Youth
Gone Mad’s collaboration with one of the godfathers of American punk,
Dee Dee Ramone. A multicolored disk with an original Dee Dee faux
primitive painting imprinted on the A-side, it features some of last
songs ever recorded by the counterculture icon who anchored the leg-
endary Ramones.
The music itself is downright morbid. On one cut, “Horror
Hospital,” Dee Dee snarls pre-elegiacally in a clipped Queens accent, “I
feel awful/ I feel awful/ I feel awful/Horror Hospital.” The song, a three-
chord punk basic with straightforward, pulsing guitars and turbulent

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 pacing, is faithfully Ramones-like, monotonous, topically truncated, and
resolute in its self-conscious simplicity.
But my job is not to critique the album, but to sell it, period.
I fire off e-mails to Amsterdam, England, Germany, Canada, Mexico,
and Japan, writing orders, confirming shipping instructions, and
exploiting the obvious urgency of a limited edition: order now or miss
out. I call large distributors in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and
Los Angeles. I call stores in Kentucky; Newbury, Massachusetts; and
Evanston, Illinois; culturally remote locations that hardly seem meccas
of potential picture disk customers.
They all buy, not spectacular amounts, just enough to quickly dis-
perse the limited edition pressing. In a few hours, my entire inventory
is sold out; the only remnant of the Dee Dee Ramone shipment is a
copy I stash for myself, adding to the growing pile of collectibles that
have accumulated during a lifetime of working in the music business.
Compact disks I pawn regularly; my vinyl collection will be pried from
my cold dead hands.
It seems odd, in the digital age, the era of merciless reproduction,
that vinyl would still have cultural gravitas. The technical idioms of the
new millennium are fundamentally seamless, non-tactile, pure ether.
Yet as a result of my work, from producing vinyl records for a myriad of
independent labels to selling picture disks or simply squirreling away
stocks of wax in the corner of my nearly empty apartment, I’ve learned
firsthand that vinyl is far from a cultural afterthought.
Blazin Records, one of the many underground hip-hop ventures
I’ve worked for, is an all-vinyl enterprise, having issued seventeen titles
on wax without releasing a single compact disk. Maximum Rock ’n’
Roll, the flagship punk zine, explicitly requests vinyl records for review,
warning that CD releases will probably be ignored. Your typical indie
rock group or up-and-coming punk band will most likely have a discog-
raphy listing seven-inch releases and limited edition vinyl full-lengths.
To certain constituencies, vinyl is clearly a relic whose time has come.
In the grand schema of the music industry, sales of vinyl records are
statistically insignificant. According to Soundscan, the music industry’s
sales tracking system, aggregate vinyl sales were around 1.5 million last
year.2 Tallied in a category entitled “other” in Billboard Magazine’s
weekly “Market Watch” column, it is a relatively insignificant total com-
pared to the 650 million compact disks sold last year. As the numbers
suggest, vinyl has been abandoned by average music consumers and
the mass merchandisers that serve them, with nary a vinyl bin to be

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found in Best Buy, Musicland, or Wal-Mart. Adding to its marginality is
the relatively small minority of well-known artists (primarily hip-hop
and so-called alternative) who issue their latest releases on wax. Vinyl
seems commercially irrelevant, an afterthought of the download era, a
relatively quaint remembrance of things past with no bearing on the
state of the music industry or on present popular culture.
But vinyl’s overall market share does not reflect its growing rele-
vance to the underground. As the number of compact disks purchased
in the U.S. market has steadily declined, eroded by the by free down-
loads and rampant piracy, vinyl sales have actually risen. In the past
three years, during the calamitous epoch of compact disk attrition, vinyl
has posted single- and double-digit Soundscan gains, up a compelling
18.1 percent in 2003. The retailers to which I regularly sell order vinyl
in greater quantities than compact disks. And the number of audiophile
re-issues of seminal works in jazz, hip-hop, and rock equals that of the
industry’s halcyon days of CD conversion, when vast catalogs were
transferred to the digital medium of the future, and resold to music fans
at a profit.
Reports of the the resurgence of vinyl don’t surprise me, working
at an enterprise like Morphius. It is evident in an endless stream of
seven-inch EP disks, twelve-inch picture disks, and full-length albums
that lay stacked atop my desk. We carry hundreds of titles from famous
bands such as Black Flag to the not-so-famous-but-emerging Double
Dagger. Our in-house groups—the Fuses, Slow Jets, and the Miss—have
all released seven-inch disks, utilizing the form in a variety of creative
ways: split singles (with songs from one band on one side and another
band on the opposite), silk-screened jackets, numbered series, and
most spectacularly, the improbable seven-inch picture disk. Vinyl is a
marginalized format to some degree, but it also engenders intergener-
ational passion that resists unencumbered file sharing and rampant
downloading.
Adding to the peculiarity of vinyl’s staying power are qualities that
make it naturally antithetical to the modalities of the digital age. It is
costly to produce, expensive to replicate, and burdened by a manufac-
turing process that is prolonged and prone to error. Unlike compact
disks, which can be duplicated on a rudimentary PC, or produced in
bulk at relatively low cost, vinyl works within the procedural realities of
“real time,” an anachronistic concept that involves weeks or months
from finished master to product.

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 To reproduce a recording on vinyl requires the creation of acetate,
a plastic reference master that looks like a record and can also be
played. The acetate is “cut” on a large, motorized lathe that literally
carves the grooves as the mastering engineer plays back the recorded
material, fine-tuning the sound with outboard equalization and com-
pression. Once the acetate is finished, a metal “stamper” is formed from
the acetate grooves, an actual die cut machine part that is used to press
the records out of pure, liquid vinyl. This process is labor-intensive and
time consuming. Add a printed jacket, picture disk impression, or spe-
cialized shapes, and the costs can be prohibitive.
Higher production costs translate into higher prices at the cash
register. For example, the triple-disk set of BBC recordings from T Rex,
or Morphius’ 180-gram vinyl series of Sun Ra’s seminal album,
Heliocentric, cost significantly more than the average full-length com-
pact disk. Picture disks can run up to twenty dollars apiece or even
more online. A triple gatefold of a live Oasis recording hits the street at
roughly thirty-five dollars. Given higher production costs and an exact-
ing replication process, vinyl fails the postmodern marketing test of
accessibility and fluidity of distribution.
But vinyl still sells, and, as indicated by Soundscan, has grown in
popularity. It appears that, at least to a small, yet resilient sub-culture,
vinyl is a working paradox—un-downloadable and difficult to burn,
share, or otherwise deflower with technology—impractical, but still
viable. Yet this quasi-resurrection from the format graveyard seems not
only poorly timed, but inherently illogical. What relevance does vinyl
have in the age of the online celestial jukebox—what does it offer, as a
vehicle for art and music, that the compact disk or the MP3 do not?
In comparing these technologies, the MP3 seems to have the
advantage of being more in sync with contemporary expectations. The
MP3 can be instantaneously downloaded and uploaded from halfway
around the world; vinyl must be transported by truck, plane, or boat. A
vinyl record is a permanent frieze of a musical performance, the song
sequence and sound quality made immutable by the strictures of the
manufacturing process. A set of MP3s placed on a hard drive can be
re-sequenced, remixed, processed, and otherwise dissected with inex-
pensive software and widely available plug-ins. Obviously vinyl
has different technical properties than an MP3—differences that
are defined by the potentials of each distinct technology,
representing a schism that determines how the art is
crafted, distributed, and ultimately experienced.

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 Theorist Walter Benjamin dissected a similar technological diver-
gence almost seventy years ago in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction,”3 which explored the difference between
the original and the copy. Duplication technology, according to
Benjamin, interpolated a unique per-
formance with simultaneity, exporting
The audience that buys these elements into a medium that
a vinyl record in a jacket embodied both. A Puccini opera
desires an object-relation to recorded in Rome is played in a living
art, whereas the audience room in Bakersfield, Ohio, ten years
downloading the formless later, still immediate in the grooves

” MP3s prefers convenience of the 78 rpm record. An actor’s per-

and control. formance—cropped by camera,
etched on film, and then viewed
halfway around the world—is dis-
lodged from the temporality of the actual, live performance. The image
projected on the screen or the voice of a singer recreated via the cone
of a speaker is simultaneously preserved and duplicated, fracturing the
coherent time sense of the performance as it occurred.
Benjamin believed mechanical reproduction had political implica-
tions: that the advantage of transporting ideas mechanically, particularly
via film, created a rhetorical tool of extraordinary influence. The ability
to reach a diverse mass audience had radical social and cultural conse-
quences. Mechanical reproduction offered a relatively seamless link to
communicate with a larger and previously inaccessible audience. Film
could be used as a vehicle for exposing political atrocities or, conversely,
as means of social or political control.
Yet it is the primary distinction of original versus copy that defined
Benjamin’s argument and allowed him to correctly anticipate the new
imperative of a politicized art. Updating Benjamin’s dichotomy to
understand the contemporary relevance of vinyl requires a different ter-
minology, applicable to distinctions of the digital age. For example, the
idea of form is useful, as it provides a contrast between the ephemeral
and the concrete, the file and the disk. Likewise, the idea of speed
works by comparing the relative properties of vinyl and MP3 to dissem-
inate ideas, which go from “fast” to “spontaneous.” Each comparison
nets a cultural face value that is easily translated into a shorthand for
understanding the particular medium’s relevance to the audience.
In the case of form for example, the audience that buys a vinyl record
in a jacket desires an object-relation to art, whereas the audience

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 downloading the formless MP3s prefers convenience and control. Thus
the audience creates a “culture of use,” that is to say, different prefer-
ences for record jacket or file, picture disk or iPod, which accumulate
into customs or “rituals” of interaction.
The implications of a culture of use are better understood if the ori-
gins of Benjamin’s argument are traced backwards. The social schisms
that followed the democratization of art in Benjamin’s milieu were
notable for an unprecedented acceleration of rapid and dominant cul-
tural change. The weaving of a style, song, star, and politician into the
fabric of now was accomplished with inimitable speed and prowess.
Hitler’s rise was arguably accelerated by the surreally hostile film
Triumph of the Will; likewise in the United States did the cultural homog-
enization that quickly preceded the war evolve into the uniquely
American suburban, modular æsthetic. Change was facilitated by the
reproduction of ideas, the transmitting of duplicate images, the sonic
assuaging of masses of people in the name of politics, art, and religion.
Now, as technology, replicative or otherwise, has gravitated toward
allowing more distinct control by the individual, we see an effect on the
audience’s relationship to art. Just as the MIDI studio and sound syn-
thesis eclipse the need for separate musicians in the creation of distinct
sounds, MP3 technology puts the power of distribution and replication
in the hands of the individual—a process that once included manufac-
turing craftsmen, wholesaler/distributors, and small retailers: physical
links imbued with practices of interpersonal communication.4 These
physical links are bypassed by the MP3’s fluid technology, and thus it
has altered the culture of use that surrounds the music, much like the
piece of vinyl originally severed the direct connection between audi-
ence and artist. And as Benjamin concluded, this change is evidenced
by the politics of the art itself.
The MP3 marks a political shift not only in the process of dissemi-
nating art, but in the act of consuming it. The formless MP3 not only
dictates less control for an artist over his or her work, but articulates the
value of possession as a fluid transaction between anonymous creator
and anonymous consumer. This implies a change in the nature of art
from an unbending set of physical modalities to a mutable, alterable set
of indirect relationships. The relationship between the music and the
listener, the image and the viewer, is no longer bound in the texture
of the object; it is now mediated by the dictates of the technological
freedom to rip, share, and download.5 The links and or nodes that
constituted the physical relaying of the music from record label to

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distributor, to distributor to record store, have been compressed into a
simple transaction, theoretically between the creator and the listener,
more often simply an instantaneous expropriation from one hard drive
to another, a transfer of electrons and ephemera. In short, the MP3, as
a political tool, represents the exchange of information, music or other-
wise, without the filters of the aforementioned community of exchange.
In the simplest terms, this represents the end of politics as a communal
art, and presupposes the age of pure individualism, what, for lack of a
better term, can otherwise be characterized as neo-modern.
Individualism is perfectly synchronous with the MP3, and will per-
haps find its form in the music best adapted to it. Danger Mouse, as an
example, has taken the truly unique utilization of MP3/digital-based
composition, called “mashing,” and created a worldwide phenomena
with The Grey Album, which was, literally, a sonic fusion of the Beatles’
White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album. Aside from the legal controver-
sies, the work itself has none of the strange overlapping irony of one
of Danger Mouse’s most accomplished predecessors, the Justified
Ancients of Mu Mu (JAMS), a sampler outfit that took advantage of the
nascent technology of the late 1980s. Their song titled “Whitney Joins
the Jams,” Mu Mu’s bastardization of Whitney Houston’s song “I Wanna
Dance With Somebody,” featured two drunken cockneys chiding
Whitney, like soccer fans on a binge, over a heavy four-on-the-floor
house beat—a legendary expropriation of other people’s material that
ended in a court-ordered recall and destruction of every single copy of
the record.
Danger Mouse, unlike JAMS, does not add his own voice to the mix;
he simply stitches together bits and pieces from each record; the result
is a more melodically rich Jay-Z with lush backing track, a bizarre, mer-
curial blend of languorous guitar chords and clipped, frenetic hip-hop
vocals. Danger Mouse’s work evidences the real power of MP3 culture,
which lies not in identity or voicing, but in pure anonymous control, art
stitched together at the digital seams, spread around the world on the
Internet via a single hard-drive, and arriving at a sort of invisible fame,
dodging legal bullets like an unwieldy shadow.
Perhaps in homage to Benjamin, we could call this the “cult of the
individual,” although this “individual” is purged of all the characteristic
traits that personify the late-model corporeal version. The digital indi-
vidual has an almost divine power, immersed in what amounts to a mag-
ical world of omniscient access, uniting disparate artists and blending
their work into a single, sonic form. The power of this metaphor has

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 already been prefigured by other types of individual expropriation:
digital photography, Photoshop alterations, and other manipulations of
visual culture.
This is where vinyl finds its place: in the domain of the communal,
the physically linked, and with those predisposed to the mystery of tac-
tile boundaries. Benjamin might have called it the “cult of the origi-
nal”—his take on the function of religiosity in early twentieth century
cultural life—in the sense that art functioned as a singular presence in
the context of religious rituals. But as we have witnessed, our secular
culture ritualizes many activities with its secular tools, like advertising,
branding, and nostalgic imprints; prophylactic holidays create markers
necessary to replace religion’s nomenclature. Whatever the usefulness
of rituals, the ongoing improvement of replication technology has sim-
ply left behind markers that are both associated with and primary to the
artistic eras they represent. What was once the cult of the original is
now better understood as the “cult of the obsolete.”
The cult of the obsolete is much more attuned to the underlying
social significance of the consequences of technological change. Sign
up to record collectors’ e-mail group Killed By Death, a loose associa-
tion of fans of early eighties punk music, and you will be immersed in
all the vagaries of valuations, for example the mid-eighties post-punk
macabre outfit the Misfits versus the progenitor of the British DIY (“do it
yourself ”) scene, the Desperate Bicycles. The disputes focus primarily
on the value of the object, the relative values of a pristine Desperate
Bicycles seven-inch disk versus a somewhat damaged Misfits twelve-
inch. A messy re-ordering of musical history sorted out through a
simple, unilateral group affirmation: the eBay auction. In that post-
capitalist supermarket you will find the ultimate declaration of value
when the Misfits’ twelve-inch sells for $2500, and a Desperate Bicycles
original seven-inch (with sleeve) for a paltry $45. The cult of the obso-
lete creates a hierarchy of subjective valuations affirmed by a commu-
nity through the pricing of the object. Even though the Misfits exceed
the Desperate Bicycles in price, both artists’ musical legacies are pre-
served by a common form, suggesting that content in conjunction with
the object dictates the valuation of the music as a communal expression
of dissent, disgust, and resentment.
Vinyl, and its cult of the obsolete, is also a migrating type of neo-
traditionalism. It is a talisman for those who require context and
continuity, a patina of time that is both linear and tangible, a communal
sense of art via the audience, which can be touched, appreciated, and

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 found in the object. This cult employs rituals like unlocking the secrets
of a double gatefold, marking the inner label of a seven-inch with one’s
name, and examining these objects later in search of memory’s frisson.
In a sense its members are bold contrar-
ians; in another, pallid sentimentalists.
Whether grasping at Whether grasping at straws and finding
straws and finding comfort comfort in a world that no longer exists,
in a world that no longer or waving off the dsytopian future of
exists, or waving off the a Brave New World with a Pink Turds
dsytopian future of a Brave picture disk, the ultimate goal is, either
New World with a Pink way, to re-orient social relations to the
” Turds picture disk, the ulti- way things were.
In opposition to this cult of the
mate goal is, either way, to obsolete, there is, of course, the cult of
re-orient social relations to the individual, which uses the MP3 as
the way things were. currency for barter. If we extend the
underlying principle of the technology,
that is, that it magnifies the imperatives of the people that use it, the
MP3 becomes another distinct marker in the evolution of human val-
ues. Nothing governs the soul like form, at least in a world in which the
soul is confronted by corporeal being. The city, an urban sculpture, is
more likely to lend itself to this idea, but it is easy to understand that
the digital world has form as well, albeit not constituted in a way we
are used to. If a digital highway is built with electrons, then we can
conclude that the cultural symbols of this hidden architecture are fluid
representations of power. The speed of light is not really attuned to our
sensibilities, as Jean Baudrillard noted, but we are accustomed to its
power. As the mysterious innards of our machines grow smaller, our
sense of empowerment grows inversely proportionate. This is the tri-
umph of the individual, elucidated on a keyboard; our fingers claw for
the words, but we find the mettle in clicks of the mouse.
The distinction between original and duplicate, the cult of the orig-
inal versus the politics of copy, can be thought of differently through
the lenses of digital technology. Both forms—the vinyl record or the
MP3—represent markers or representations of human values in the
process of change in relation to art. To recondition our æsthetics, we
must first be prepared in some way to accept the consequences of
change. Just as the entryways of buildings seek to re-orient our senses
in preparation for bolder architectural statement, so does the form of
certain technologies prepare our perceptual instinct to accept the realities

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 of new types of relations. The MP3 is a loose entry feature that pre-
supposes that the individual is empowered to render a personalized,
cut-and-paste culture.
In Species of Spaces and other Pieces, Georges Perec elliptically
studied the defining limits of objects, the import of a bed or the wall in
his apartment, for instance, to comprehend how form defines our cus-
toms and habits.6 In one passage, he sought the extra room, the space
without function, “neither the usable nor the unused, but the useless.”
As I contemplate the sagging industrial shelves stocked with hundreds
of vinyl albums in an aging Baltimore ex-mansion, I think I’ve found what
Perec meant. The extra room, the spare shelf, the triple gatefold matte
finish jacket: as Perec pointed out, the spare room was the defining
space, the entree to the void that defined all other rooms. Vinyl has the
“spare-room” quality, the replication void that defines by its limitations
the powerful properties of the MP3. Neither usable nor unused, it con-
tinues to have a role in the dissemination of art, by virtue of the obso-
lescence of its technology and the obvious distinctiveness of its form.

ENDNOTES:

1 “Triple gatefold” is similar to a tri-fold compact disk booklet, with three

attached panels that open to display artwork, lyrics, or both.
The standard weight of commercial vinyl is between 115 and 130 grams of
vinyl per disk. 180- to 220-gram disks are considered “audiophile” quality due
to their increased durability and deeper grooves. Many re-issues of jazz, rock,
and/or punk classics are 180- to 220-gram disks.
2 Soundscan™ is a point-of-purchase sales tracking service that generates the
information used to calculate all of Billboard magazine’s sales charts.
3 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
1937. Available at <http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html>
and numerous other Web locations.
4 MIDI is the “Musical Instrument Digital Interface” standard, which, along with
readily-available synthesizers, revolutionized music by facilitating production
in home studios in addition to commercial recording facilities.
5 “Ripping” refers to capturing audio from commercial CDs to computer files
which can then be compressed into MP3s and, for example, easily distributed
on the Internet.
6 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, John Sturrock, trans.,
John Sturrock, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997).

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