After months of nagging my dad, he finally came home a week ago with a large cardboard box on the back of his bike. He had just returned from a repair store in Williamsburg and the box contained our newly fixed turntable.
For years, our record player had sat on top of our stereo, broken and despondent. Ancient as my dad himself, it collected dust and seemed to melt into the furniture. I spent many hours poring over my dad's hundreds of records, longing to play them and yet not having the chance. Although I could've easily downloaded everything in his collection from the internet and listened to it on my ipod, I wanted something more than that. I wanted something beyond the quickness and immediacy that my ipod presented me with. I wanted the experience of vinyl, of letting the needle drop and hearing the faint scratch signal the beginning of another tune.
As soon as I helped my dad set up the record player, I selected a record from one of our many shelves and proceeded to carefully place it on the turntable. The disc started spinning and I raised the needle delicately and set it on the edge. As the first chords of "Melancholy Man" by the Wake drifted through the speakers, I settled down into a rocking chair underneath the stereo to let the music wash over me.
The experience I get from listening to music on vinyl is very different than my feelings when listening to my ipod. Listening to my ipod, I feel distanced from the music. Everything sounds farther away, as if I am listening through some invisible filter. When I listen to records, I feel more connected to the music, almost as if the record is spinning in some secret corner of my mind.
For the first few years that I had an ipod, I would mainly listen to it on shuffle. I didn't realize that by doing so I was ignoring one of the main messages of any artist, and depriving myself of the way it should truly be listened to -- straight through without any interruptions. The only way to achieve this flowing quality is by listening to albums, not by catching passing glimpses of songs through shuffled selections.
One alternative to the ipod is the CD. Although CD's are a great medium for music, vinyl is even better because of its personal and intimate qualities. Hearing the warm crackle of the static always present beneath the depths of the music brings a fireplace scene into my mind, and strikes a nostalgic vein that only Instagram and a few chillwave songs are successful at duplicating.
Nowadays, appreciation for the album as a whole is waning because of the immediacy and convenience of the ipod and the mp3. Most of my friends have never even considered listening to vinyl records at all -- they dismiss it as a pastime reserved for old people stuck in the sixties. But a few of them recognize the importance and magical quality of vinyl and share my belief that records should be more admired than they are now. Vinyl must be saved.