Introduction: Why Vinyl Matters
After 15 years of 'forced abstinence', I have just recently bought a
used record player. Putting on records I acquired in my youth, I began to
think about how many times that record had been played and (if it is second
hand) by whom and with what motivation; under which circumstance, producing
which feeling? How many conversations got started on little intricacies
of the tune issuing forth from the loudspeaker; discussions about the meaning
of lyrics or the quality of band and music, only to drift off into the deep
recesses of different personal meaning worlds with wholly different criteria
of judgement that meet in dialogue? But this is not to say that these exchanges
(both between people and between individuals and music) do not leave and
imprint, indeed they are like grooves cut into the soundtracks of our lives.
Not everyone's life is a Long Player (LP), but after all, it is not the
size but the content, the meaning, that matters: consider the fact that
some of the greatest artists in the early days of mass-produced music (and
therefore mass-judgement) like Chuck Berry's or Bill Haley's hits were only
released on singles, while the long playing format was reserved for 'serious'
classical music.
The point is that music matters: it matters in content to individual lives
to varying and changing degrees, and also through the meaning produced out
of the musical 'matter' (as the artefact record), by which we transform
our individual life-worlds and everything and everyone that is tied up with
those. Music is a universal aesthetic and symbolic practice (Merriam 1964:229),
but I am here less talking about the music itself than individual lifeworlds
that are shaped by it and find expression in the practices of consumption.
The vinyl record as such may be an antiquated medium.
A friend recently met a 13-year old who claimed never to have seen a vinyl
record and not to know what a vinyl record was (B.N, pers. comm., 09.01.04).
Nonetheless, Ebay Germany
lists almost 100000 vinyl records, and internet search engine Google
found 1,650,000 hits for the search string "vinyl records" - in
0.11 seconds - most of which are second hand vinyl pages. A third of German
households still own a record player (Media Perspektiven 2003:64), a remnant
of the times when music was first released for popular and mass consumption.
The gramophone was indeed developed at first only for recording speeches
(1), it took another 50 years to attain the status of
mass-produced home entertainment technology. Another 50 years later, we
have today arrived at the point where digital media are freely available
and have generally replaced analogue media like the vinyl record which figures
around a stable 1% in the sales of the music industry and refers to expensive
vinyl re-releases of classic albums and the few mainstream artists who still
release vinyl (IFPI Germany
2003). Official bodies of the industry attribute
these sales to "DJs and vinyl freaks" (2) who
may be partly responsible for the continued existence of records in music
shops. In fact, as will be seen, the majority of records bought and listened
to today are not available on department store shelves but in exclusive
and informal markets outside 'mainstream' circulation.
By reading 'between the grooves' of my informants stories and attitudes,
I will show how music in today's global context as the work of consumption
(as both reception and interaction) matters in the sense of creating a personalised
version of meaning out of the contradictions between society, politics and
economy. Arguably, these contradictions, or 'disjunctures in global flows',
as Appadurai (1990, 2000) calls them, are a set of concrete effects that
arise out of the contemporary mode of (auto-)organisation of global human
life. Hardly anyone would deny today that it wouldn't matter to the rest
of the world if a tanker spills its oil on some Atlantic shore, if someone
decides to cleanse the world of a certain ethnic group, or if someone flies
a plane into an urban high-rise building. But I would actually go so far
as to claim that even a song on a record, and so partly the record itself,
or the individual choice to buy a certain record or to download it free
from the internet surely have a cumulative effect and repercussions on the
wider world. The everyday, the apparently insignificant, has been discussed
by people for millennia, we - as scholars of the cultural - have only recently
started to give these issues any attention at all.
I will be aided in illustrating my points by statements of 'native theorists',
people whose lives are in a fundamental way tied to music, who would say
that music has had a formative and long-lasting effect on their personality
and lives. I see their collections of music as a tangible expression of
this fact, and indeed record buyers, listeners, and 'vinyl junkies' relate
the practice (not hobby!) to the string of events that is their lives. But
more than that, the practices of aesthetic judgement (irrespective of whether
there are objects involved or not) are a self-positioning in social space,
a distinguishing between what one is and what one is not.
To discuss these issues, I adopt here a circulating mode of inquiry that
is inspired by hermeneutic approaches. By zooming in on the field of record
collectors in three cycles of questions, I will present a combination of
my and my informants' arguments. The following process of zooming out reveals
wider scopes that need to be discussed in more widely than it is possible
in this text.
Zooming In will be an exercise of applying Bourdieu's model of
the social space as well as other approaches that sideline arguments necessitate
to my data.
Part 1 will situate my group of informants according to their personal
histories which I will call life trajectories. Their access to vinyl is
quite obviously tied to their musical taste (and the availability of music
formats at that time), which in turn is the major axis youth cultures
revolve around. The individual formative consequences of development from
school age peer groups, and on to more defined groups that have been labelled
subcultures helps give a sense of what Bourdieu (1979, 1984) would have
called their habitus, giving an impression of how their innate
individual structures that generate action have been structured by their
youth experiences. Music as an extraordinarily unruly and 'messy' field
of research here plays an important role because "other cultural
forms - painting, literature, design - can articulate and show off shared
values and pride, but only music can make you feel them" (Frith 1987:140;
author's italics). Eisenberg, in Clintonesque Funkadelic rhetoric,
speaks of music as "stuff", a thing that brings people together
to become a "thang", drawing participants into a shared experience
(1987:95).
Theory on late modern global changes (in Western capitalist countries)
and their consequences for matters of identity will give possible interpretations
of the reasons for the process of disengagement that is taking place in
adolescence. Few people beyond their teenage years would willingly accept
a subcultural label. I will show this as being a joint result of (physical
and mental) age and global changes. Personal biographies today tend to
be influenced more by what Appadurai (2000) calls the 'global flows' of
increased motion and mediation. The disjunct and fragmented nature of
these flows creates uncertainties that can best be countered by increased
individual flexibility, which results in a general refusal on the part
of young adults to be ordered by classification into 'scenes'. This refusal
articulates itself in self-created lifestyles, the picking and choosing
from an immensely diverse and highly mediated repertoire of forms of social
practices, to fit wants and needs that give some feeling of security.
Visualising the social status of the academic writer (within his respective
institution), it is understandable that youth has long been seen as 'the
Other', the exciting, the dangerous, the - with a dose of adult romanticism
- mysterious. In the construction of this boundedness are implications
about power, which seems to be the overarching notion in the theories
I use: from the deviant gangs of 1940s Chicago sociology to 1960s Birmingham
School accounts of symbolic resistances of marginalised classes, from
1980s 'post-whatever' approaches to a preoccupation with globalism and
social practice in the 1990s, the red thread running through all of them
are issues of ideology and hegemony. My understanding of Gramsci's notion
of hegemony informs my angle on these issues, opening up a field of contestation
that is best illuminated by the oppositions between 'underground' and
'mainstream' and other similar discursive dualisms like alternative -
conform, hip - square, revolutionary - conservative.
Part 2 shifts attention to the object of inquiry, the vinyl record.
As a consumed mass-produced good, it can be analytically subjected to
sociological and anthropological theories on the role of everyday things
for social life. The cultural elitism of the distinction between high
and popular art (produced by the Enlightenment) and the resulting cultural
pessimism of academia seen in industrial mass-production has been countered
with celebrations of consumer agency. In this, these theories have again
a common orientation towards power-infused social interaction between
the corporate capitalist producer and the potentially empowered late modern
consumer which I label a hegemonial field.
By setting the object in the context of its users, it sheds its alienating
appearance and becomes a blank slate, to be inscribed with meaning by
the consumer. With theories that emphasise this production of meaning
I will be able to relate this productive effort to an overall late modern
'aestheticisation of everyday life'. Examining collecting as a material
practice adds a further dimension to human-object relations. Collections
of unique or mass-produced items are exemplary for our context because
they require the attribution of meaning to come into existence. Furthermore,
a collection means possession, a more durable relationship with the consumer
that may run as deep as telling its owner's life story.
Part 3 will draw together the dispositions of the vinyl consumers
that had been shaped by their life histories both relating to humans and
objects. On the basis of this knowledge, I will describe how these dispositions,
the habitus, generate aesthetic value judgements that serve to
make distinctions. In the age of digital technology, I see their statements
first as legitimisations for a seemingly remote choice, only to be relativised
by their value judgements resting on what I call the 'aesthetics of authenticity'
and the 'aesthetics of use value'.
Next, I will describe how a field-specific form of cultural capital produces
and is in turn produced by this aesthetic dimension of habitus
and discuss the appropriateness of Bourdieu's definitions for the taste
culture of vinyl consumers. This provides the backdrop for the actual
distinctions that are made and the resulting positioning in social space.
Several kinds of distinctions are made, firstly within the group against
the obsessive end of vinyl consumption, and as an overriding principle
the general delineation of 'authentic' music cultures versus the mainstream.
Setting these distinctions into context with the actual social practices
of the informants, several apparent contradictions emerge between the
rhetoric of the vinyl taste culture and their actualisation in individual
social, political and economic behaviour. Possible directions of explaining
these contradictions as results of global flows and discontinuities will
be given in the following concluding chapter.
Zooming Out continues the exercise by unveiling the mentioned contradictions
as effects of the interrelatedness of distinctly defined spheres of human
life. What is often uncritically labelled globalisation Appadurai (2000)
posits as flows in a model of imaginary fragmented lifeworlds he calls
'scapes', where human imagination takes on a new role and is characterised
as replacing/overlaying/augmenting the work (and duty) of consumption.
By discussing apparent contradictions between ideology and its manifestation,
I will briefly outline his model and highlight exemplary contradictions
by ordering them to the interrelated scapes. The remaining question of
the resistant potential and possible extent of a 'politics of the everyday'
will be examined by models that open up another layer of politics in the
ordinary everyday and are subsumed under the heading 'sub-politics'. I
will show that the informants are aware of global interconnections between
polities, economies and societies and that their (more or less) explicit
positioning against an 'immoral' music industry guides their everyday
action, not only as consumers, but also producers and distributors of
music. The degree of potential action rests on the positioning on a continuum
from what I call 'analogue' to 'digital aesthetics', tying consumers'
habitus with the probability for either communal, alternative action,
or a more private, individual pragmatic infiltration of niches, corresponding
to notions of positive and negative ideology. Finally, I will relate my
interpretation to matters of epistemology apparent from the interview
material and resulting from the academic task of making sense of it.
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