“We both know it’s not fashionable to love me.”
The first words on Lana Del Rey’s new album, “Honeymoon,” drip with irony as they make their way into 30 enchanted listeners’ ears. They sit, crowded into a living room like sardines in a can of briny sonic revelry. The conversation crests as the first song comes to an end; a bottle of $3 wine makes its way around the room. Silence falls as the next track begins.
Those words apply to vinyl records themselves, too.
An advance copy of “Honeymoon” — let’s consider it an elopement — spawned this late-night listening party after a student happened upon it. He paid $42.64 for the two-disc record — four times the cost of a digital copy, eight times the cost of his monthly Spotify subscription — in short, a completely unnecessary expenditure for a college student who regularly resorts to the dollar menu at Taco Bell.
As each track scratches its way out of the beat-up old Crosley’s speaker system, the atmosphere in the room sinks deeper into a trance, punctuated by random bits of conversation and laughter and seasoned with the scent of Virginia tobacco smoke. Each guest receives something different from the experience: some are there for the community, others for the wine, while the true believers are relishing the opportunity to hear the album before its official release date on vinyl, a medium that promotes a more memorable experience.
The album itself has two levels of significance here. On the one hand, it represents the honing of a craft, the development of a musician’s artistic style through the successful fusion of the haunting lyricism of “Born to Die” and the more upbeat, Dan Auerbach-assisted vibes of “Ultraviolence.” This long-desired synthesis has garnered numerous favorable reviews, and in this sense it’s the next step in a story and in a career. The story of any artist, however, depends on the reciprocal relationship between the music and the listener — a relationship which has become strained in recent years.
In our generation, the everyday music listener has sold out, going the way of fast food and mass media. First with Napster, then with iTunes, Pandora, and now Spotify, it has become increasingly easy to take an à la carte approach to music that elbows out the artist’s creative voice one 99-cent download at a time. We throw together a couple tracks from one artist and a pair from another, and so on and so forth, and soon you have something you can listen to while you study and work out and eat a romantic dinner and go on a road trip and tune out your roommates. Rarely do we make the effort to listen to an entire album from start to finish — fast songs, slow songs, overplayed songs, and songs that are quite understandably not quite so overplayed.
In other words, the vinyl album doesn’t conform to our immediate preferences.
An album is more about the artist’s vision than it is about our enjoyment. As a rule, that doesn’t fly with our generation. It becomes the artist’s exposition — their talent, their emotion, and their soul, all coalescing to make a series of overlapping vignettes that make a unified work of art — one which we are permitted to share, if we so choose.
This is where the vinyl record has clawed its way out of obsolescence and found its niche in modern culture, within the ranks of music listeners who appreciate the artist’s vision for how the album was meant to be experienced, and who don’t mind a little sophistication. Sure, they could be listening to it on Spotify just the same, but they chose to spend a little extra to buy the record; they chose to take the time to lift the needle, to place it delicately on the outermost ring, and to sit back as the communion between performer and audience begins.
According to the BBC, 4.6 million vinyl records were sold in the United States in 2013, nearly 500 percent more than five years earlier. In Britain, 389,000 vinyl albums were sold, a 50 percent increase. Across the globe, the industry reckons that sales of vinyl added up to $171 million, compared with $55 million five years earlier. These numbers suggest that maybe there really is something about taking that trip to the record store that makes the extra time and expense worth the trouble.
Maybe this trend of “vinylism” is a luxury only afforded to the paradoxically upper-middle class hipster crowd who insist on returning to the inconvenient and obsolete in order to make a cultural statement. But no matter the reason, one thing is certain. The respect we show to our favorite artists when we dedicate our time and money in this way can increase our appreciation by more fully honoring the original intentions of the authors. If vinyl encourages this attitude of reverence and participation, then maybe it’s worth scouring your parent’s attic for that old turntable, ordering your favorite album off the Internet and giving “vinylism” the old college try.
