This past New Years’ Eve my friends and I were counting in the year to the soundtrack presented by BET’s “Top 50 of 2012.” Around count 10 I proposed a bet to my friends: we each picked a word we expected to hear in the next song on the countdown, whatever that song might be. I lost that bet.

BET’s list is not balanced genre-wise, skewing toward hip-hop and R&B. Fresh off hearing Nas’ “Daughters,” at number 10, which ends with the word “love” (its only mention of the same) I picked “love” as my word, knowing popular statistics were on my side. My two friends selected “niggas” and “pussy.”

The next song, Rick Ross’ “Stay Schemin’,” included plenty of “niggas” and even “pussy,” yet not one mention of “love.” Following songs were also heavy on the N and P words, and naked of the L word. My mistake, I admitted, may have been I was expecting to hear more R&B, the preferred form for love ballads, and gangster rap was a wholly different genre.

Yet both genres originated in the underground. Hip-hop originated as a genre of rebels and protesters looking for an alternate musical outlet, and while not yet homogenized, hip-hop as a culture has developed its own norms. One apparent norm today is not rapping about love.

On his 2008 album, I’m Innocent, rapper Murs drew attention to this problem in his song “Love and Appreciate 2.” In the song, Murs speaks as intro “we’ve been talking about how for our hip-hop generation it seems like there’s no more love songs—it’s like all the women are Bs and Hs, and it seems like nobody’s man enough to talk about love.” But is the problem really a lack of manhood in hip-hop, or is the problem a misunderstanding of manhood?

Despite that I am a woman, I recognize my genre of choice (hip-hop) is yet another place in the world where gender stereotypes predominate and male and female roles are far out of balance. Likely this is another contributing factor to hip-hop’s over-developed testosterone. To prove their manhood rappers too often assert their dominance over women. Note too that Murs, a vocal critic of his own genre’s direction, is considered an “indie” or “underground” rapper—not a rapper likely to be displayed on the Billboard’s top charts.

Back in the day, in old school hip-hop’s origins, with groups such as Public Enemy and Rum-DMC leading the development of a new sound, love was not yet a hip-hop taboo. To the contrary, Public Enemy’s early works included songs “MKLVFKWR (Make Love Fuck War)” and “Whole Lotta Love Goin On in the Middle of Hell.” Among Run-DMC’s originating works was the song “Let’s Stay Together (Together Forever).”

As this article goes to press, topping the Billboard charts are Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” and Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” Though these songs are considered perversions of the genre, they adhere to its norm—not a single love reference. On the other hand, the top R&B songs, by Bruno Mars and Justin Timberlake, are unafraid to drop the L word.

Maybe this explains hip-hop’s evolution: the “soft” in the culture are relegated to R&B, and those who want to keep their hip-hop label (and avoid becoming one of Dre’s “Bitch Niggaz”) develop a harder edge. Yet to avoid becoming a genre of anger and flash, and lose its substance, hip-hop artists need to step up, and remember the words of Run-DMC.

To quote “Let’s Stay Together,” on behalf of the relationship between hip-hop and love, may hip-hop remember with love the genre has “been down together since day one.” So hip-hop, this is love speaking—and let’s stay together.

Television: not punk rockers

But “the genre formerly known as ‘post-punk’” is less an extension of punk than a radical re-interpretation of its underlying elements. Angst? Check. Guitars (loud)? Check. Charismatic frontman? Often, check. But  there seems to be more nuance and less brute force behind post-punk. You hear more complex guitar lines and harmonies, enunciated vocals rather than screamed ones. Post-punk seems to have more in common with modern indie rock’s restrained self-awareness than punk’s balls-to-the-wall ethos (not that Sonic Youth didn’t shred, of course). Maybe this is why we might call it “post-punk,” humoring a sophisticated superiority complex by emphasizing how far we’ve come from our philistine roots. But this again is faulty – like I said, the natural environments of the two parallel genres are fairly similar. So the label of “post-punk” either subjugates that agitated, Stratocaster-driven music to punk, or it distances it from punk, neither of which is really fair.

This obviously pent-up diatribe popped into my mind today when a friend told me he’d been listening to some “post rock.” Now first of all, rock ain’t dead, at least I sure hope not. I’m not sure if you can turn the relationship between punk and “T.G.F.K.A.P-P.” into a linear-algebra like series of transformations, but if you did, I found myself wondering whether they would have any bearing on the relationship between rock and whatever the fuck “post-rock” is (I’m not yet convinced it’s anything). If there’s any point to this, and I’m certainly not sure that there is, then it’s that you can’t really describe music only in relation to its contemporaries or predecessors. Shared inspiration, or even direct inspiration — as I sit here listening to Television, I can’t deny that elements of punk show up unaltered in post-punk — doesn’t imply subjugation.

David Whipple

I’d like to think the way in which I connect to music is somewhat analogous to the way smell and taste work at a micro level – a lock and key mechanism. From what little facts I’ve obliquely retained from high school biology, if the form and shape of a molecule are complementary matches, it can then bind to a neuron whose surface is commensurately shaped. And then that’s it; activation occurs. Not to sound cloying, but a person’s emotional landscape holds similar formal attributes when seeking and encountering meaningful “connections”. E.g., the emotional/molecular landscape of teens are riddled with craters of disaffection and angst, which is why very little music ever experientially resonates with me as much today as a pathetic cadre of hack emo buzzbands and backpack MTV rappers did when I was in middle school (although to be completely honest, I do still love some of that music – just never quite in the same way). In terms of artists who still move and bind to me today in that same rawly inveterate way, there have been few and far between – they do so only at the tiny ripped edges, the abstrusely tucked away places that I have tried but failed to smooth over.

The one record that stuck with me that way this year was Future’s Pluto. Sonically, the album’s conceptual audacity and musical cohesion have been covered by critic far better than I can. But my love of Pluto is inextricable with personal circumstance and experience. The album entered my life at a point in time during which I was taking on way too much, partly in an attempt to sublimate (illnesses within my family quickly became not just background noise, but main attractions). It’s kind of funny how beseeching I was, in 2012, to react to sentimental commercials, bad saccharine dramas, good French foreign films, and particularly moving Lil B tweets. I thought about family, love, and death constantly. So, into that weird mental constellation came Future with his eerily beautiful concept album about love, loss, outer space, and “wearing Gucci, wearing Prada at the same damn time” (i.e. conspicuous consumption).

Supported by Mike Will’s haunting, unforgettable production, “Turn on the Lights” turned out to be my most-played track of the year. To be frank, it is simply one of the rawest, most devastating songs I’ve ever heard. Augmented and universalized by auto-tune, Future’s lamentations of his personal agonies – the loss of his friends and uncle – in light of his success were, to me, devastatingly primal and painfully resonant.

Where there’s pain, though, there’s also pleasure. In 2012, I had never been happier, being more frequently moved to tears by my family and friends and the sheer thrill of being alive. Joy can buffet you with the same velocity as pain can. To this end, on songs like “Straight Up” and “Same Damn Time”, Future’s resiliency and buoyant exultations come across powerfully and unequivocally. “Fuck the World” isn’t nihilistic – it’s a ballad of triumph (giving yourself things that the world won’t; rising above opposition). The song that does this best, in my opinion, is “You Deserve It”, a song whose message is so catholic and whose production is so gorgeous that it’s effectually become a rallying cry/mantra among my friends (a couple of times this year I’ve had the unmatched pleasure of screaming “You Deserve It” in a room with people I love and it honestly brought water to my eyes, which, in a year where “thirsty” seemed like the oft-most used pejorative, was comically appropriate).

I feel blessed that Future dropped Pluto in 2012, a year that I direly needed it. But then again, I deserve it and so do you.

Chris Hong

So what, you say. Time passes. This theme is—no pun intended—as old as time. But unlike most pontificators on the nature of time—after all, few other topics lend themselves better to being spoken of at such length—Mann does not understand time simply through a concrete series of words and actions. His time is not chronological or even logical on the surface—it is discursive, maze-like, an amalgam of tempos. Allegro here, lento there, a hop-step when times are cheerful and a death knell when they’re rough. Mann’s time is, in a word, musical. It is legato: passages describing snowflakes drifting gently down and settling on the ground and all of it happening oh. so. slowly. It is staccato: barbs exchanged between masters of repartee in conversations akin to ideological rap battles. It has breaks in rhythm, slurs and blurs.

So it comes as no surprise that Mann’s most formative influence was not a writer but a composer—fellow countryman Richard Wagner. In his essay, “The Sorrows and Greatness of Richard Wagner”, translated by Mann’s longtime friend Helen T. Lowe-Porter, Mann explores the spell Wagner casts on listeners. He asks of him, “What was it that drove [people] into the arms of his art—what but the blissfully sensuous, searing, sense-consuming, intoxicating, hypnotically caressing, heavily upholstered—in a word, the luxurious quality of his music?” Although he had mixed feelings about Wagner as a person—Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite, while Mann was a spokesman for anti-Nazi intellectualism—Mann could never break free of his influence.

In fact, one has the same feeling reading through Mann as when listening to Wagner: that everything seems strangely familiar. And it is. Wagner pioneered what critics call the leitmotif, a “theme associated throughout the work with a particular person, situation, or sentiment” according to the OED. (Think of Darth Vader always being announced by a series of sinister “dun-dun-dun”s). Mann borrowed it. The recurrence of old themes in his Magic Mountain takes us from the present back to the past back to the present without having recourse to the ever-annoying and inaccurate flashback. The leitmotif mimics the flickering feeling of memory in a way classic, linear music can’t. There is no more “before” and “after”. Past and future blur. Linearity, so neat and clean and spare, is bent and warped into a series of spirals running inward and into each other. Themes appear, reappear, invert and subvert themselves in passage after passage. What you end up with is something “sense-consuming, intoxicating”—a self-referential, interwoven and interconnected whole that grows richer each page you turn and note you hear.

This is why Wagner’s operas feel like an immersion that is hard to swim out of. He plunges us into a timeless mythological age of Rheingold and magic swans, of Holy Grails and Valkyries. His operas seem to last forever, intensifying this hypnotizing effect. The worst parts of his opera—chanted recitatives that advance the plot and nothing else—seem to drag on for hours. But the best of his music accomplishes just what Mann said they did: the melodies consume the senses, intoxicate the soul, and before you know it they have transformed into something else entirely. Harmonies and new melodic strains melt into a throbbing outpouring of sound. Time lapses. The recitatives restart. Time resumes.

So with Mann. The litany of adjectives he uses to describe Wagner, “sensuous, sense-consuming, intoxicating”, just as easily come to mind when reading Mann’s rhapsodies on music’s ability to transcend, bend, and blend in and out of time. Like listening to Wagner’s operas, reading Mann’s books rarely goes at a steady pace. You burn through some of his chapters presto and slog through others. Mann mimics the experience of music and life itself—the boring parts drag, the transcendent ones zoom past.

In his lovely excursus on music in The Magic Mountain, “Fullness of Harmony,” Mann shows us the marvelous time-shifting and soul-sifting effects a gramophone has on protagonist Hans Castorp. Castorp has been living in a tuberculosis sanatorium for several years when the staff acquires the gramophone, “an overflowing cornucopia of artistic enjoyment.” Holing himself up in the playing room, “our beloved hero” Hans listens to record after record of music. Eventually he strikes upon what one may infer as Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, that lovely swirl of consonant and dissonant sounds, of whole-tone scales and vivid tonal color. While listening to this music, Hans enters “a single fugitive moment that yet held all eternity in its consummate bliss…Forgetfulness held sway, a blessed hush, the innocence of those places where time is not”.

And here is where Mann hits upon the intoxicating seductive elixir that is music. It dissolves time, is outside of time, and yet, is a series of divisions in time—rhythm and beat, after all, are based on temporal durations. So what gives? Mann does not give us an answer. Instead he immerses us in this mixture of time and timelessness over and over in his bursts of poetic inspiration.

None of us get very far when we look into the nature of time. Mann argues in his Magic Mountain that man is so out of touch with time that, without a watch, he is entirely incapable of knowing how much time has passed. And though Mann investigates time again and again in The Magic Mountain, he never hits upon what it is exactly. He only records how it feels, how it bends the perceptions and experiences of the characters that people his world. The same can be said with music—whether music is within time or outside of it, whether we can transcend time through music or not, how music can be where time is not, Mann never really states. He asks all the questions but offers no answers.

Like us, Mann runs into that huge roadblock: trying to articulate what time and music are in words. Each of us knows what both feel like, but we cannot break them down into a logical definition that truly defines them. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing—maybe the exaltation of listening to music wouldn’t be there if we unraveled its mystery. Maybe we should stop trying to figure it out and instead let ourselves fall under its spell. The result is nothing short of magic.

Andrew Koenig

Originally Published in the Fall 2012 Issue

It is difficult not to agree that, for the most part, Nietzsche’s prophecy has come true. Within popular culture, music and musical figures have far more influence than visual art and their creators; more people know who Jay-Z is and care about his aesthetic message than those who follow Jeff Koons. However, within music, a profound break from the conceptual and historical conditions I have just described is beginning to occur: music no longer feels itself tied to time. It has invaded the realm of space and has adopted an entirely new mode of creation: the evocation of imaginary landscapes and environments from the ground up and from the conditions of an absolute and continuous space itself.

From a certain point of view, music has always dealt intimately with space: Greek dithyrambs were suited for the theatres of tragedy and Christian hymns composed for the distinct kinds of reverb and acoustics of a church. Even today in contemporary culture, this kind of interaction with space is important to music; U2 and Coldplay sound like they do because they play in stadiums, and their music is created specifically for that experience. There is a distinction, however, between interacting with a place and interacting with space itself.  The Ancient Greeks did not have a word or a concept corresponding to what we understand as space. What they understood were topoi or “places” like a bedroom, a house or even, possibly, a certain segment of air, which, however, would be delineated not by a assumed set of spatial coordinates, but by the actual, material bodies that surrounded it. The idea of a uniform, infinite and continuous space—what can be called “absolute space”—is a much later concept. This more modern notion of space existed for a long time before music decided to conquer it. Even while this concept existed as a scientific and philosophical notion, music remained a part of the specific environment or place that culture dictated it to be—the theatre, the concert hall, etc. Nevertheless, the idea of absolute space is an undeniable pre-condition of the musical revolution I wish to describe. What actually allows music to utilize absolute space derives from technological advancements, particularly headphones, and the now ubiquitous presence of fairly high-quality audio systems that grant one entrance into a wholly private, internal realm—a realm ultimately dictated by the conditions of absolute space, and not by a culturally determined place.

In this way, music has become completely autonomous over the kinds of environments it can create. Listening to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion is an experience that in many ways has nothing to do with the physical place which you occupy while it plays. The world of Merriweather is its own, purely imaginary, environment to which the listener is transported; it is a world of neon monsters, painted children, and tribal rituals—at least in the way I imagine it. This kind of creation of an environment—as opposed to being determined by it—has been made entirely possible by both the conceptual and technological determinations I have described. Obviously, I do not mean to suggest that Merriweather cannot be listened to other than with headphones, but I do contend that it is with this device that the music is perfected and perhaps the experience for which it was truly made.  This is because of how headphones utilize absolute space.

With headphones that fully cover the ears, the entire spatial arena from which the ear receives sound is given over to the music being played. In this way, the musician—especially the electronic musician who works with a computer—has the ability to place each and every sound in basically whichever point in space he wishes (although of course this precision takes a great degree of skill), and the coordination of sounds in absolute space is entirely given to the listener as the artist wishes. Contrast this to a church or any performance in a building, where the music that is made is already dictated by the particular spatial structure of the building.  With headphones, the artist constructs his own acoustic structure by placing each sound in its particular point or area in the spatial field that the headphones provide for the listener. It is thus, “from the ground up,” that the artist can create his own environment, his own place.  But it is a place that he himself constructs and creates from the conditions of a uniform and absolute space itself. The musician is now the architect.

Even the spatial experiments with music that became fashionable in the 20^th century, such as John Cage’s 4’33, fail to approximate the significance of the spatial revolution I am describing. With regard to space, 4’33 is all about exposing the pre-existing architecture of the place in which the music is performed: the performer sits at the piano for four minutes and thirty three seconds and the listener is expected to hear for the first time the actual sounds of the world, specifically in the performance space he or she inhabits. Thus, in 4’33, the musician bows to the architect and praises his sonic wisdom.

Musicians who experiment with musical sculpture, in creating objects that behave according to acoustical rules which they themselves dictate, perhaps more closely approximate to what I am describing. However, this process cannot hold a candle up to the autonomy over absolute space, which the headphone-musician today possesses, since the physical sculpture always occupies a fixed point in space in relation to which the listener can alter his own position. In this way, the artist does not have complete control over the environment he creates, as the listening experience is co-dependent on the listener. This is different from contemporary headphone-music in which the artist has full autonomy over the sonic structure of the listening-experience.

The fact that this revolution has occurred should be clear from the way in which listeners of indie music today often evaluate albums. Great albums are those that create environments and are not determined by them, thus signifying the autonomy, imagination, and vision of the artist. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is considered a classic for the singular and unique universe it creates, as well as Merriweather Post Pavillion. Panda Bear’s Person Pitch is another great example and is an album in which time has been largely subordinated to space and the creation of an environment. Songs on Person Pitch are of an indeterminate length; the “time” of the work is essentially a canvas upon which a collage of different sounds is layered on top and around one another in space. Undeniably, this revolution in the role of the musical artist via headphones and spatial autonomy is a profoundly significant event in the history of art and music. It’s something we should all be excited about.

Adam Klein

Originally Published in the Fall 2012 Issue

The way a musician divides time—how one delineates the musical space—is consistent with the way he or she sees the world. So first, decide how you see the world.

One of the most effective ways of breaking up time is also the simplest—dividing evenly. Humans love repetition and routine—they get on the same subway car every morning, eat the same sandwich for lunch everyday, and watch the same TV show every Tuesday night. Breaking up time evenly is good for getting people to dance. Dance can be your worldview. I think Madonna is a worldview. Listen to “Borderline” and you will understand. If you keep going, keep repeating, dividing regularly for vast stretches of time, you can achieve a hypnotizing effect. You can drown your listeners in the permanent, immortal pulse of your music. The minimalists—Steve Reich, Philip Glass, LCD Soundsystem—are like those pre-Freudian hypnotists that would dangle a pickle in front of you until you fell into a therapeutic trance. Sometimes, repetition can hypnotize people and make them dance—imagine a drum circle in the darkness of a Gambian night, the rhythmic pattern iterated and reiterated on goatskin, the overtones of the djembes swirling in tandem with the legs of the tribesmen.

Are you more emotional? Even melodramatic? Try this. In the nineteenth century, Romantic composers called for careful stretching of their ostensibly even metrical grids. They called this leeway “expressiveness.” Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt wrote directions like rubato, espressivo and con affetto to instruct players to slow down or speed up artfully, to inject sighs and whimpers between their notes, to transcend the rigidity of the grid. The Romantics’ worldview, simplified, was that life was pretty dramatic.
Stravinsky used metrical changes to craft a mercurial, eccentric musical world. He could make these changes aggressive, as in The Rite of Spring, or elegant, as in his wind octet, or the Histoire du Soldat suite. The Rite is cacophonous and surprising at every turn; it is music of the body, of hardness and realness. The octet and Histoire are tamer but no less physical; their shifts in meter evoke the bumpiness and angularity of life. Progressive rock bands like Rush and Yes also made use of changing time signatures. However, potential prog-rockers beware: this insistence on switching meter can get tiring. I think Rush’s worldview has to do with making things complicated for the wrong reasons, but that’s another battle. Deerhoof breaks up time in a similarly erratic way. I like them. Their worldview is something like: “whoah, wait!”

One of my favorite ways of delineating time is not delineating time. In the second half of the 20^th century, composers toppled almost every barrier that restricted the musical space, time chief among them. Though they usually used barlines to guide their players, who still owed debts to time, they molded time into unrestricted, freely contracting and expanding musical organisms. Large orchestral works by Luciano Berio and Jacob Druckman, chamber music by Olivier Messiaen and George Crumb, and art rock pieces like Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” leave you swimming, with no perceivable gridlines to hold on to. In the instructions for his orchestral work Atmosphères, György Ligeti writes, “There is no such thing as a beat.”

One of the reasons why Beethoven was so modern for his time was that he, like Pink Floyd and Ligeti, realized the irrelevance, the tractability of time. In his late piano sonatas, he saw that rather than conform to time he could shape it around his struggle—a world slowly receding from deaf ears, a retreat into a tempestuous but silent inner life—and all its crises and revelations

So those are some ways you can break up time in music. Recognize, though, that all this work molding the musical space is for naught. We can’t experience musical time as it’s presented to us; music gives us too much to think about. Our brains are busy absorbing the patterns of music, playing a game of tension and release, of memory, expectation and anticipation. When you listen to music, you are almost always in the past and in the future, but hardly ever in the present. Your brain is spinning and it’s confused and it’s trying to make sense, trying to organize. Trying to capture a point of view.

Gideon Broshy

Originally Published in the Fall 2012 Issue

I’m not hip but I like history. For this reason, all of the albums I’ve reviewed for this zine have been dinosaur albums—Ancient and Modern by the Mekons and 50 Words For Snow by Kate Bush, aside from the aforementioned. Only Bush’s record transcended the category by offering anything really new. But Tempest and Elysium are interesting because of their extreme consciousness, to the point of parody, of their dinosaur-album status. Start with the titles. “Elysium” connotes a peaceful, happy afterlife; “Tempest” refers to the final theatrical work of the second-greatest poet in the English language, after Dylan himself. Then the lyrics: Dylan sings, “Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing/Blowing like she ain’t gonna blow no more,” and paeans John Lennon as the final track on his album; Pet Shop Boys sing, “After being for so many years/the life and soul of the party it’s weird/I’m invisible,” and, on “Your Early Stuff,” they sing backhanded compliments to an aging recording artist. So what do the Pet Shop Boys and Bob Dylan make of being dinosaurs and the purpose of their music now?

Both artists are known for snark, especially on the subject of pop music. The Pet Shop Boys skewered U2 back in the day with a song called “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously,” which came packaged with a cover medley of “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “I Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”. As for Bob Dylan, several of his albums have been, arguably, jokes on his own legend, starting with Nashville Skyline, a light, easy-listening country album, and Self-Portrait, full of songs where Dylan didn’t even sing. The thought that comes to mind when listening to these albums is parody—parody of technically perfect, vapid pop in the Pet Shop Boys’ case, parody of Bob Dylan in Bob Dylan’s case. Why else would artists as lyrically brilliant as these two release, respectively, songs with lyrics like: “You’re a winner/I’m a winner/this is all happening so fast,” or “You shined so bright/Roll on, John,”? And yet, there’s no juxtaposition, no snark, no give-away, and the artists seem to stand behind their work un-ironically in interviews. So what gives?

The circumstances behind crafting a dinosaur album, generally, are these: you’re a well-respected artist with a comfortable position in the industry; you have a lot of fans who have grown older and nostalgic; your sound—your personal brand, really—is recognizable as a successful and well-defined commodity; finally, you are not under pressure to grab attention or establish a legacy, but are free to do what you want as long as it sells enough to justify releasing it. What does this naturally result in? A well-played, well-produced, well-promoted product that plays it safe (in order to sell to the nostalgic, undemanding old fans who want some of the sound they know and love) and is untouched by any sense of urgency. None of these are bad things necessarily—that is, an album of good-natured songs in which the artist knows what they’re doing and is clearly having fun. There’s nothing wrong with comfort food. The problem, in this case, is that the Pet Shop Boys and Bob Dylan are artists whose meaning lies in meaning. Taking on subjects, answering the culture around them, is a habit for them, and it’s for this reason that their songs necessarily engage with things that are important (pop music in the PSBs’ case, American mythology and John fuckin’ Lennon in Dylan’s case), and if they’re just kind of playing around, those songs will be disappointments bordering on insults.

So, look—Dylan and the PSBs are just doing what they want. They’ve earned that right, surely? Why should we be offended? BECAUSE: nobody who has nothing to say, nobody who’s fine with total irrelevance should sound as good as these artists do, or get the kind of promotion that these artists will. We are talking about Tempest even though Tempest doesn’t demand that we talk about it, because it’s Dylan, and what will he do next? The Pet Shop Boys are not “invisible,” they matter, because they were really really good once, and being really really good is an important thing in pop music and stays important even after all the buzz dies. Because our history, ultimately, should be able to sustain us when the present of which we are a part of inevitably—as these guys are clearly aware—abandons us.

Song-based pop music is history—it’s done. Pop music is history—nothing ever goes away. (The Pet Shop Boys open their album: “Our love is dead—but the dead don’t go away”; Dylan sings about the goddamn Titanic.) These artists have more to give, I know it, I’m sure of it. But if they don’t want to that’s fine. But to make the claim that you ARE Bob Dylan or you ARE the Pet Shop Boys, to take advantage of BEING Bob Dylan or BEING the Pet Shop Boys, and then to come out with an album that DOES NOT FULFILL THE CULTURAL FUNCTION OF BOB DYLAN OR THAT OF THE PET SHOP BOYS doesn’t cut it. Pop music can’t afford ageism, including self-imposed ageism, anymore. There should be no such thing as a dinosaur album.

Nathan J. Campbell

Originally Published in the Fall 2012 Issue

Music is both literally and figuratively a function of time. It draws us in to its tempo, transporting us back and forth in time through each crescendo-ing memory. When I listen to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony I am in Interlochen, Michigan, watching the setting sun filter sweetly through skinny tree branches. Sufjan Stevens’ Impossible Soul takes me on midnight car rides through sleeping suburban streets.

In this way, music exists in a dimension beyond space and time. Philosophers refer to the sum total of one being’s state of existence as a space-time worm. My space-time worm extends to include my past, present, and future in one winding path. It is this worm that defines my identity, creating continuity between my infant self, my present self, and my uncertain future. Each piece of music I listen to can tap into my space-time worm. My relationship with any one song changes over time, and yet maintains all of my previous experiences of those notes. As I listen to a familiar melody, the music transports me to different times in my life when that song played in the background of my internal experience. My relationship with music extends through space and time, weaving a continuous map of my growth, memories, and emotions. The space-time worm of music extends even beyond my own experience to it. Music connects us to others, weaving them into our memories and thoughts. It was a pleasure to watch Angela, to see her recall her love of her sister between the notes.

In his “Visions of Johanna,” Bob Dylan sings mournfully, “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet? We sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it.” Dylan’s lamentation is tempting to fall into at times, but the music itself negates the possibility of his isolation. He claims to be stranded, an island of a man, but by communicating this worry in song, he is reaching out to others, affecting their thoughts and emotions. Through music and the memories it evokes, we are connected to each other and to ourselves in an acutely intimate way. It makes sense that Elgar would seek to immortalize his loved ones in the phrases of his Enigma Variations. The music lasts, still drawing us in decades later, folding modern audiences into the declaration of his affections. Just as Yeats writes that poetry “survives in the valley of its making,” so too does music. It survives in a valley furrowed in time and memory, where just the rise and fall of piano keys contain a whole world of human history.

Jenna Kainic

Originally Published in the Fall 2012 Issue

However, Merge Records seemed to have anticipated this and included an MP3 download code for the entire album on a tiny slip next to the physical record inside. In today’s digitally oriented music industry, my first vinyl purchase was my initiation into the new movement known as the “Vinyl Revival,” a term for the recent upsurge in vinyl purchases in a musical age in which the mp3 reigns supreme.

These two formats, mp3 and vinyl, are part of a long debate in music recording that has existed since the advent of the compact disc, the debate between analog and digital format. Today, a good sound system makes it nearly impossible to tell the difference between the two mediums. Most audiophiles continue to contend, however, that analog recordings are truer to the original sound. A digital recording reduces sound output to a piece of data, matching notes to specific values at the price of fidelity. While today’s technology has progressed to a point that captures music with near pinpoint accuracy, some nuances inevitably fall through the cracks. Analog recordings, on the other hand, capture music in a continuous wave of sound. Its distinction most commonly manifests itself at lower frequency sounds, mastering it seamlessly, unlike digital. Audiophiles say these lower frequencies give vinyl a “warmer” sound than mp3s, a sense of greater proximity to the music. But this is a distinction that means more to vinyl-heads than the average listener. It fails to singlehandedly explain the peculiar anomaly in today’s music industry: as mp3s come to dominate the music market more and more, there has been a powerful resurgence in the purchase of vinyl LPs—a small boat coming up in a rising tide.

Nielsen SoundScan tracks record sales in all mediums every year and releases a midyear analysis. As of July 2012, 2.2 million vinyl albums were sold in the United States, a 14.6% increase from 2011. Vinyl sales have been steadily increasing at similarly impressive rates for the second half of the last decade. Record execs have regularly used them to cast the industry’s status in a better light; headlines like “Vinyl sales prove strong despite declining overall” abound today as much as they did in 2005. Though the phenomenon has become trite in recent years, it appears unwavering: mp3 sales are up, album sales are down, and vinyl has been suddenly imbued with a new breath of life.

Many are surprised to learn that this is actually the second so-called Vinyl Revival. The first occurred in the mid-to-late nineties when, much like today, everyone wanted to be a DJ. Teenagers rushed to the record store in dreams of becoming the next Prodigy, Aphex Twin, Chemical Brothers, et. al. With many riding the assumption that spinning would be easier than playing an instrument, vinyl records saw a slight boost in sales that surprised many industry representatives. However, the 90s revival pales in comparison to the magnitude of today’s vinyl revolution and the motivations behind it seem markedly different. Whereas DJ-wannabes of the 90s bought records, today’s aspiring EDM artists buy Ableton and download Serato software. The vinyl sale charts for 2012 are tellingly topped almost exclusively by indie rock artists.

It is difficult to imagine a more fitting vinyl chart-topper than Jack White’s marvelous April release Blunderbuss. Just as he created a modern reinterpretation of the blues tradition with his latest record, White has also reinvented the sale of vinyl for modern times. His label, Third Man Records, issues its music almost exclusively on vinyl and promotes the medium across the country in unique ways—including a truck that roves around the country selling records like ice cream, launching limited edition balloons with flexi-discs attached, and opening a chic vinyl store in Nashville. Yet, beyond his quirkier antics lies a basic economic approach to an era in which vinyl is suddenly in demand. White offers an array of widely released albums on vinyl for the standard $15-$30 value of most albums, but auctions off limited-release pieces from big names to the highest bidder on eBay, with some records going for as much $300. White has wedded himself and his label to vinyl; unsurprisingly, the Alabama Shakes, partners of Third Man, come in at number 7 on Nielsen’s list of top vinyl sales. Jack White and his friends stand at the helm of a subculture committed to the medium. His dedication comes from a sentiment shared amongst music listeners who buy vinyl today.

“The whole experience of vinyl is what we’re after, the romance of it.” – Jack White

Since music has become increasingly intangible, questions regarding our relationship to it have suddenly abounded. Since the vinyl LP appeared in 1948, musical media has evolved greatly, but the age of the MP3 has brought an unprecedented sense of facelessness to the musical community. The 45, cassette tape, and CD all retained an identity specific to artist and album through their inherent palpability; but now all your favorites can coexist is a formless file from Apple. When ownership is defined by a simple click of the mouse, people seem to demand more, and rightly so.

The first record I bought was beautiful, 12” x 12”, slim yet firm, vibrant lines on a deep black. Admittedly, something was silly about it—a freshman in high school cradling an unplayable piece of plastic with an awkward reverence. Still, that attachment was powerful. My dad felt a sense of connection and pride when he dragged out a box of old LPs with his record player. They were a potent reminder that the album cover was once a piece of art—the removable banana peel on The Velvet Underground and Nico, the working zipper on Sticky Fingers, the simple sexiness of Candy-O. The vinyl sleeve remains the best way to appreciate album artwork, where you can pick it up and feel it, examine it in its entirety. Then you pull out the record, textured and jet black. A spinning record creates a feeling of engagement more than any MP3 player ever could; you watch the music emerge from the disc, you hear the difference when something barely brushes the stylus, you see the album progress as the arm gradually moves inward. Jack White captures the spirit of vinyl perfectly: it is a romantic experience.

So we have a revival. A return to the physical, the romantic, the music of our parents. Perhaps it’s a denial of the progression of the medium, perhaps the laptop wunderkinds will frown. Fuck that. Vinyl remains the medium that builds the closest sense of identification with the music we love. That’s a sense we can never leave behind, and yet we can always come back.

Colin Groundwater

Originally Published in the Fall 2012 Issue