The Renaissance of Vinyl

In customary college gusto, I set off with a dozen friends to Asheville, North Carolina for spring break. Only a four-hour journey away, this uber hipster town turned out to be a universe away as far as the culture and atmosphere were concerned. The streets of downtown Asheville were riddled with coffee shops, bookshops, bars and boutiques selling t-shirts with ridiculous slogans at equally ridiculous prices. This culture of music, intellectuality and relaxation bore a stark contrast from many of the surrounding places.

Down one of these many avenues, I chanced upon a vinyl retail and exchange store. It was probably one of the most “happening stores” in the neighborhood, with people jostling against one another to get their disc of choice. Nothing in the store sold for less than $15, and some of the more rare and antiquated pieces were selling in the $40-60 range. There I was, holding my mobile phone, which, if I could venture a safe guess, could access most of the songs that were available here. There was also the added perk of being able to stream all of those songs for free. However, all these phone-owning people were buying expensive vinyl records to play them on their equally audacious vinyl record players. There was clearly some beauty in this impracticality, a beauty that eluded me completely.

With a newfound curiosity, I quickly searched the web for this obsession with vinyl. There are a host of views on this, and arguably it seems like the loss in quality and sound is negligible when tracks are converted from Vinyl analog to digital. So why did sales of Vinyl, clearly the less practical way to listen to music, go from just a million in 2007 to nearly 8 million in the US?

Along the same lines, there’s a mini resurgence in the use of Polaroid cameras, being led primarily by artists and other creative personalities. Although the company itself (Polaroid) declared bankruptcy for the second time in 2008, magazines like Artspace believe that instant-photo cameras are “an art world mainstay,” with The Guardian claiming sales of the camera increased by 75 percent among the 18-to-25 sets in 2014 alone. Speaking with my sister about her obsession with Polaroid cameras (her apartment is riddled with those white framed blurry photos), she says she likes it because it’s, “Very immediate, and great when you want to have moments that you otherwise won't capture because Polaroids are a little bulky so you end up using them. It’s more of an occasion.” Although it’s expensive and requires regular refills of films, people still use them rather enthusiastically.

These improbable developments point towards a broader trend societal trend. Quartz magazine covered the vinyl renaissance, writing about how, “The further we dive into the digital, virtual world, the more ironic and iconic the physical manifestation of music (and information for that matter) becomes.” This interest in Vinyl records and Polaroid cameras is similar to the way we find typewriters fascinating and have this aversion towards e-books and Kindles because feeling the paper is an act almost essential to the process of reading. As Exabyte after Exabyte of literature, music and video is being uploaded onto the web, people who can afford to hold on to tangible forms of creativity are trying their level best to. Spotify and online PDFs are the main currency of creativity these days, which is why our penchant for straying away from the mainstream has made us revert to almost impractical forms of media usage.

This really says something about us. As we embrace technology and the convenience it affords, there’s a stubborn and determined part of us that wants to revel in the “occasion” that comes with owning these retro art pieces. In the mid to near future, there is going to come a point when libraries become bygone relics of a time long elapsed. Data from the Publisher’s Association study paints a telling picture. Though overall book sales were up, digital books jumped by a significant 66 percent as physical book sales dipped by 1 percent, a stark contrast. A Time article about the same muses on how, “digital convenience will continue to outbalance what’s surely a generationally linked fondness for physical paper artifacts (if anything, that accelerates as the digital aesthetic improves).”

There’s a confluence of generations, with the oldies of the yesteryears fondly remembering the record player their fathers used religiously over the weekends, the youngest of the young learning how to use iPads in synchronization with learning how to defecate, and then the ones in the middle who deftly use that iPad to find nearby vinyl retailers to use their grandfather’s dusty player. Many even believe that people buy vinyl records and develop Polaroid photos for their “soul”—the belief that if it can sit on your tabletop or hand from a pin, then it’s somehow more valuable than the sleek, virtual version of it in your MacBook Air. The relation we have with art is inextricably linked to technology, and it’s the fact that these products are defying commercial beliefs that’s so beautiful in the first place.