Look, I am a white guy who grew up right when CD technology (and profit margins) were phasing out vinyl, and also hip hop was blowing up to the point Colonel Sanders died and became a cartoon doing the backspin across the screen like a Press Your Luck whammy. So it is only expected that I would be obsessively compulsive and collect records like an autistic audiophile with triple disability checks to spend. (Speaking of which, has there been any study on why children of the ‘80s became so obsessive compulsive, and helped create all the stupid things we helped create? Were previous generations like this, just they didn’t have the internet to fully indulge themselves and their bizarre obsessions?)
In my adult life, it seems the more I have children, the less I buy records. At one point, inside the Secret Clubhouse message board, we used to do a thing called the $20 Record Challenge, where the rules were you had a simple $20 and you spent it on records all at one time in one record store. This gimmick allowed me to get clearance from the home office for more than a couple $20 binges in the basement of Plan 9 Carytown, or digging through the strange 7-inches in the back room of that weird ass record store in Ruckersville. Now, my records have been scattered amongst the compound. There’s stacks of 7-inch singles in the unfinished hallway cabinet. There are sideways stacks of albums in the front room, plus a ton of records in the camper behind the house. The odd diaspora is all the records used to be in the front room, but the best ones made it outside to the camper over the past two years, but then probably two milk crates worth of the best of the best made it back into the house for the kitchen record player or those times I hooked up the USB turntable inside, so my records are all over. That’s a long ways from when I used to have them separated into about five different genres, then alphabetized by artist. The best set-up was this big two shelf rack I had that held them all at that poine (which was about 1500, which I made my limit... if it went bigger than the racks, it was time to thin out the herd), and I would pick records out to play, and then when it’d get sag to the stacks, I’d push the records to the edges from the middle, and fill the bottom spaces with ones from the top, so essentially, my best records would be towards the middle of the top shelf. None of it was alphabetical, or even slightly organized, and there’d be clusters where I could recognize, “Oh yeah, that was when I was in a British space rock kick,” or “Man, I was playing the fuck out of shitty B-team Wu-Tang instrumentals there for a while.” Records are the greatest material possession I’ve ever unnecessarily accumulated. As much as people would tell you otherwise, they’ve never been made obsolete. Records are my friend.
This will be a list of records I wish I had. I’ve tried to limit it to records that actually exist on the earth, but I haven’t actually finished the list yet, so who the fuck knows? Most likely, knowing me and how I get bored with being serious about anything, I’ll probably make up some complete nonsensical rigamarole, say something retarded, and call it a wrap.
No comments:
Post a Comment