The (Not So) Strange Return of the Vinyl LP
In which George experiments with AI-assisted songwriting
A few weeks ago I saw an article which noted that for the first time in decades, sales of vinyl albums have outgrossed sales of CDs in America. Certainly some of that is because no one buys CDs anymore, but I believe there is something else going on behind the scenes with all these new vinyl customers, something that speaks to the broader cultural moment we are living through… I believe this because I myself am one of those newly-minted vinyl customers.
I grew up in a small Virginia town… a suburb of Washington, DC… about twenty miles from the Washington Monument as the crow flies.
Like every small town back in the analog before-times, we had an indie record store. Ours was called Penguin Feather Records and Tapes. Penguin Feather occupied the bottom floor of a large white Victorian Craftsman right next to a legendary (for us, anyway) Mexican breakfast joint in the center of town. The front door sat right in the center of a broad clapboard front porch, the kind where you would expect to see men in searsucker suits sitting on porch swings sipping sweet tea out of mason jars and beginning their sentences with a Foghorn Leghorn-ish “see here, Ah say, see here”, rather than billboard ads for KISS, Michael Jackson, The Police and Judas Priest.
Despite the unusual setting for a record store, inside a craftsman single family home in the Virginia horse country, everyone was welcome at Penguin Feather. But you had to be at least 18-years-old to enter the back room, because that’s where they sold all the paraphenalia for… smoking.
Smoking tobacco… obviously.
Needless to say, our parents were clear with us that we were not allowed to go to Penguin Feather Records… ever. Equally needless to say, we went to Penguin Feather Records all the time, anyway.
It was easy…. we were all latchkey kids with two working parents and everything in town, including Penguin Feather, was walking distance from home. If you think it’s difficult to keep track of what kids are up to here in 2023, imagine what it was like in the 70’s and 80’s, back when kids actually left the house from time-to-time, and did not have google search histories or YouTube playlists which could be monitored. To give you an idea of what that world was like, take a look at this PSA, produced by a New York news station, that actually asked its viewers the question “it’s ten PM, do you know where your children are?”
Presumably, quite a few parents in those days were forced to answer that question honestly… “No. No I don’t.”
Back in those pre-Internet times, the only surveillance option available to most parents was to physically follow their kids around like Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez on a Stakeout. And when it came down to it… no working parent had that kind of time.
And so, we were mostly left to our own devices at Penguin Feather. Inside that record store, we had our own indecipherable teen language. A language our parents did not know, and wouldn’t have been able to understand if they did. Oh sure, every now and then something like the rumor that KISS stood for “Knights in Satan’s Service” might bubble up far enough into our parents’ consciousness for them to attempt to ban it in our houses, but such incidences were rare. Our parents had no idea that Iron Maiden was anything other than a medeival torture device. But inside Penguin Feather, we would return to the Maiden section over-and-over again, searching the curtained windows of the buildings in the background of the KILLERS album cover to see if we’d missed anything cool during our last exhaustive search.
Back when American kids had nowhere to be and nothing but time to kill, there was real freedom to be found in record stores like Penguin Feather. But also there was access to things, or at least access to information about things, that felt dangerous and forbidden… things that felt adult. In America’s record stores, “sex, drugs, and Rock n’ Roll” wasn’t just a goofy parental warning, it was also a “to do” list. Record stores were among those places where kids learned to do dumb things of which their parents didn’t approve, while surviving just long enough to learn important life lessons.
It is the period in my life which most tugs at my nostalgic heart strings. The music and iconic album covers of that period are often the trigger. And so it was an easy question to answer when, a couple of years ago and thirty-some-odd years after my last visit to Penguin Feather Records and Tapes, my wife suggested that it might be fun if we got a turntable for our house. Being the good husband that I am, I bought her one for Christmas.
And then a weird thing happened. We started going out of our way to visit used record stores and flea markets. Within a few months we had a collection of vinyl that would have made my 15-year-old self drool with envy. Just last week I scored a copy of Live at Budokan for six bucks at an indie shop near Tulsa, OK. And as with any collector’s hobby, each new discovery fuels the search for the next.
I never really stopped to wonder why all this had happened until last Christmas when we were preparing for a cross-country road trip. Having made this drive several times, I now know that there are some very long stretches of road where there is neither a cellular signal solid enough to enable streaming, nor a radio station playing anything other than fire and brimstone apocalyptic religious sermons. And so I went to the attic, where all my CDs have been stored (and mostly forgotten) for a decade or more. While flipping through the sleeves I stumbled on a couple Robert Plant albums I bought in college and which I had completely forgotten about.
I had forgotten about them (and a bunch of others in my collection) because I had digitized all my music and migrated to services like Pandora and Spotify where I let the Apps pick my paylists for me. As a result I had become too dependent on the algorithm.
At best, this is lazy behavior which denies us the thrill of discovery and narrows our field of options. At worst, it’s dangerous, because the algorithm only shows you what it wants you to see (or hear). Sure it’s only music we are talking about in this case, but the more you become dependent on the algorithm for one thing, the more likely you are to become dependent on it for other things.
But now, having thrown off the shackles of the algorithm in some small measure, I can report that I feel like that kid in Penguin Feather once again. That sense of freedom and discovery is back as I flip through albums in shops occupying store fronts in small town strip malls, where old console video games are sold right next to the Lionel Ritchie LPs, and the carpet hasn’t been replaced since the last time Ritchie was climbing the charts.
But it’s not just the thrill of discovery or that nostalgic sense of freedom that keeps me hunting for new (old) albums… the more I think about it, the more I think there’s something else going on… something that is also related to that damned algorithm, but in a much more nefarious way.
I have a growing fear of censorship… of the mass memory-holing of anything that doesn’t toe whatever the latest “NPC” line might be. What amounts to, essentially, the willful destruction of our culture and all it has produced or achieved in pursuit of some unattainable Utopian ideal. I worry that it won’t be long before Rock N’ Roll sits firmly in the crosshairs of a new generation of Woke Scolds who want to purge the Earth of anything they deem “problematic”… things like “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll”, for example. And because of the dizzying pace of technological advancement, I’m absolultely terrified that they are going to figure out a way to do it so that we won’t even notice it when they do.
Hollywood may have been the first to take up the cause. Remember the drama when Warner Bros. threatened to pull GONE WITH THE WIND from its streaming service and only changed their mind after a very embarassing public outcry? Do you think the Woke Scolds of Warners realized the error of their ways and retreated for good, or do you think it was a temporary withdrawal while they search for a way to memory hole GWTW that won’t generate the same public outcrty?
My answer to that question is to point out that was the very day I began to build my hard copy DVD Library of Cancelled Films, which you can read about here.
That same instinct to censor, to erase anything problematic that existed before Progressive Year Zero, has now begun to infect the world of publishing. Roald Dahl’s publishing company was recently caught editing the author’s original works in order to change words and descriptions they unilaterally found “problematic.” And in a post-Roald Dahl world, fans have begun to dig and have discovered that others authors, including Agatha Christie and Ian Flemming (to name only two), are facing a similar threat. No doubt that list of endangered authors will continue to grow.
Would it be unreasonable to assume that this same censorious instinct could be closing in on popular music as well?
I’m starting to think not.
Have you heard that The Rolling Stones have pledged to stop performing Brown Sugar in their live shows? Isn’t this a tacit admission that the song itself is offensive? Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal, to you. After all, The Stones are in their 80’s and the number of live shows they have left in them could probably be counted on the fingers of a dozen people. But if The Stones themselves are telling us (without telling us) that the song is offensive, then why wouldn’t our Tech Overlords take them at their word? Why wouldn’t iTunes delete the song from their service? Why wouldn’t Amazon pull the Sticky Fingers album from their service altogether? In a very real, corporate exposure, cancel culture sense… they’d be crazy not to.
Or worse… what if the record company decides to simply re-master the song with different lyrics and a new title?
Don’t laugh… there is a precedent for this too… a few years ago during one of our annual “Baby It’s Cold Outside is rape culture!!!” moral panics, two Minneapolis-based musicians re-recorded the song with new lyrics that, in the words of NPR, “emphasize consent.” Creating a lame alternative was bad enough, at least you can still listen to the original. But here in 2023 the technology exists to do the job right and replace the offensive song altogether. No more half measures for the new Jacobins.
What if someday The Stones’ record company decides “you know, Brown Sugar has a great musical hook… it’d be a shame to get rid of it… what if we just take the original master recording and lay it over with new lyrics?”
This is where AI could step in. You can already use AI to write lyrics… not good lyrics, yet, but lyrics all the same. So you get the lyrical version of ChapGPT to write new lyrics for Brown Sugar and then maybe you hire some session musician to punch them up a bit, if they suck. Then you go back to a vocal AI system and ask it to perform the song in Mick Jagger’s voice. Once the new song (perhaps they’ll call it something more “PC” like “Proud Woman”) is completed and released, all they would have to do is eliminate Brown Sugar from all the streaming services and you are well on your way to a true Orwellian Memory-Holing of the song, one that is straight out of the pages of 1984.
In a generation or two, it might be impossible to convince anyone that any other version of the song ever existed. Like the Fruit of the Loom basket or “Shazaam”, the Genie movie that Sinbad never made, future generations will insist that you are either crazy, or experiencing the Mandela Effect.
Once the precedent is set, they won’t stop at Brown Sugar. Having eagerly crossed one Rubicon, the temptation to continue further into the heart of the Empire will be enormous. I’ve written before in these pages about an Ur-Karen named Lynn Stuart Parramore who once wrote an op-ed about the time she bravely told the manager of a Los Angeles Trader Joe’s that it was insensitive to play The Stones’ “Under My Thumb” over the store’s PA system because there might be a victim of domestic violence in the store who could be triggered by the lyrics.
Keep in mind that Ms. Parramore herself was not offended by the song, rather she was worried about the well-being of a hypothetical woman who might be offended at some point in an unknowable future, and so the song had to go.
“Under My thumb” is three minutes and forty-one seconds long, what are the chances that in the less-then-four-minutes it took Trader Joe’s to play that song, a women who is both catastrophically emotionally damaged by abuse and who also knows the lyrics to Under My Thumb would happen to walk into the store? Perhaps “remote” does not entirely cover it. Now imagine having nothing better to do with your day than to worry about the emotional wellbeing of such an unlikely hypothetical person.
This is not healthy behavior.
But these are the people who will be in charge when the word goes out that it’s time to begin the final censorship war. They will rush eagerly to the battlements. And they won’t care if their cause is just, or even if it is right. If you doubt that, let me point out that there are still COVID trigger warnings on episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast at Spotify, even though almost every claim Rogan ever made about COVID has turned out to be 100% true.
I’ll close with this: As an experiment, I did a simple google search for “AI lyrics generator" and picked a link at random. I fed the system a title (Proud Woman) and told it to compose a song in the style of The Rolling Stones “Brown Sugar”… in less than ten seconds, the service returned this result, which I have edited only slightly, mostly so that it would match the rythym of the original song. Turn on the original BROWN SUGAR (while you still can) and try singing along.
PROUD WOMAN (sung to the tune of Brown Sugar)
She's a proud woman, made of fire and steel
With a look that can stop and a heart that can heal
She knows what she wants and she takes what she needs
World bows down to the Queen of night's deeds.
Proud Woman
She's the Queen of the night
Proud Woman
With a heart full of pride
She's a warrior, fierce and brave
burns like a wildfire, no one can enslave
She's seen it all, been in the game so long
And she still stands tall, like a beacon, so strong
Proud Woman
Living life on her terms
Proud Woman
With no one by her side
Aaaaaw get along, Proud Woman
Beauty to behold
Aaaaaw got me feelin’ now, Proud Woman
With a heart of gold
Noooooow, she's got the moves, and the style, and the grace
Enters a room, all eyes are on her face
With a flick of her wrist and a shake of her head
Queen of the night commands all that lies ahead
Proud Woman
And she'll never back down
Aaaaaaw, Proud Woman
Her thunder that shakes the ground
I say yeah yeah yeah whoo!
I say yeah yeah yeah whoo!
Yeah yeah yeah whoo!
I mean, it’s bad… but it ain’t that bad…
My apologies in advance if you find yourself unable to sleep tonight, maybe go out to your local indie record store tomorrow and buy Sticky Fingers on vinyl… they can’t take that away from you… at least, not yet.
I've been doing the vinyl thing as well in an attempt to break out of the "eternal shuffle" of Spotify and actually enjoy albums in their entirety. The only downside is that you forget that you have to flip the damn things every 20 minutes which makes it much harder to play records when doing chores etc.
"Offended on Others' Behalf" is nothing new. Some 30 years ago, I worked at a major museum in a large city. We had an exhibit opening on Dec. 26. (The week between Christmas and New Years is huge in the museum world: lots of families with kids home from school or relatives in from out of town, looking for something to do.) Most of the exhibit was sealed up in a gallery which would be opened on that date, but a few display cases were strewn about the lobby. The designers had wrapped them in colored paper and given them oversized bows to look like presents. My job was to write a sign explaining what was going on.
Of course, the headline on my sign was "Do not open until Christmas!" Unfortunately, the VP of our area -- a well-meaning but totally inexperienced woman, who was plucked from the corporate world and thrust into the job through some strange office politics -- wanted it changed. "Some people don't celebrate Christmas, and we don't want to alienate them." Well, like I said, it was a big museum in a big city: we had practicing Jews, Muslims, Hindu, even some observant pagans on staff. So I made the rounds:
*All of the white women said, "Well, I'm not offended, of course, but I can see how someone else might be."
* All of the white men said it was fine.
* All of the POCs said it was fine.
* The head of Community Outreach -- the forerunner of DEI -- said it was fine.
* All off the non-Christians said it as fine.
(I well remember the response of the financial manager, an Orthodox Jew nearing retirement. He peered over his glasses with a weary look and said, "Gene, my people have survived centuries of discrimination, pogroms, even genocide. Do you really think we care what you put on your little sign?")
Didn't matter. VP had it changed. I left shortly thereafter.