An Animist Buys a Record Player

Are we doomed to become what we hate? Is a single life, like the political spectrum, a horseshoe? ¹ I have to stare deeply into my soul and ask these questions, because I bought a record player.

I'm kidding, but like all jokes, there's truth here. I was born in the early 80s. Oh. Hold on.

Callie's Life with Music

So I was born in the early 80s. My first music at home was cassette tapes. My parents owned records, but not a player. I have no idea why; I would assume, given how little money we had, that their player broke and they couldn't afford to replace it, something like that. My parents didn't listen to a lot of music when I was little. We just didn't have a player. They got me one of those kid sized boomboxes that recorded, so the tape I listened to the most was my own. I recorded the intros to cartoons and listened to them over and over. The tape I listened to the most started with the theme song from Bucky O'Hare which probably tells you more about me than you needed to know. The arguments in Genshiken about anime were a little too real, but I also found myself sympathizing with the guy who said he just likes intros you can yell the chorus along to.

Anyway, I went from that to a Talkboy, the Walkman-with-a-phallus popularized by Home Alone 2. Other cassettes I remember owning were the one big New Kids on the Block album -- I only ever listened to the first song -- and Jackson's Thriller -- I only ever listened to the last song, constantly seeking that high of hearing Vincent Price's voice crack into the track.

My parents bought a stereo with a CD player around the time I was 10 or 11; when they weren't using it I was allowed to, but it was in their bedroom, so my first moments listening to music "for real" were strange, lying on my parents' bed in the afternoon, listening to the Gin Blossoms on the Wayne's World 2 soundtrack and discovering Weird Al before hearing most any of the artists he was parodying.

Eventually I got a stereo of my own, and I blasted the live Blues Brothers album while learning to play harmonica, and listened to the Eagles and Creedence Clearwater Revival. And soon after, I got my first portable CD player and became simply insufferable. I didn't talk about the music constantly -- I just had my headphones on at all times. I think I remember listening to CDs at the supper table, when we still set things aside and ate together instead of just watching tv. My withdrawal into an endless loop of my CDs convinced my mamaw I didn't like spending time at her house -- she didn't know I was doing this everywhere. The 3 or 4 times each fall we took hours-long trips for band, to perform at competitions, were marked by lengthy loops of 60s and 70s music on compilation discs, probably accompanied by a Star Wars novel.

Since music had become largely an affair I conducted in solitude, I was precisely the kind of person who wanted an mp3 player, but I had no money. I took a trip, once, to England, paid for as a graduation present for undergrad, and the bother of hauling my CDs around to listen to music on the long bus rides convinced me to save up. I can't tell you what model I had, but I can tell you it was thicker than an ipod, with a crunchy screen a step up from a calculator's. It had a vertical strip you used to navigate, not the ipod's circle. And I got pretty obsessive, in my dorm room (I stayed one more year in the dorms in grad school) and my first apartment, cataloging all my mp3s so they were easy to find on the player. I moved to Memphis and upgraded to an ipod, and naturally filled it with a ton of anime music. It was one of the lines they labeled "classic" after debuting the touch screen ipods and, by this time, the iphones. I remember how enticing and eerie the apple store was; you know what they made them look like, I don't have to make myself sound like an Iowa workshop nonfiction kid to tell you.

I held out but eventually got a smartphone and of course that was it, even the real physical presence of a device was lost. This is everyone's story, because it's what the various industries at play want. I stream my music; I even pay google monthly to do so, since it gets rid of ads on youtube when I'm watching Jeff Gerstmann complain about Dinowarz on my television. But -- and this is not the reason I made this purchase, but I think it's true -- as an animist, streaming isn't the best way to go about music, it turns out. Shocking, I know.

Vinyls though?

including a breakdown of my setup for those interested

Vinyls² weren't, as I just showed you at length -- part of my childhood or my journey through music. But being hipster-adjacent for most of my adult life (I went to graduate school in English for fuck's sake), I was aware of their resurgence. And mostly I was dismissive about it.

If the embed above doesn't work, here's the regular link. This is what always played in my head whenever anyone started talking or writing about the "warmth of vinyl" and so on. But, as with coffee a decade before, I was annoyed because it was sticking in my head, and it was sticking in my head because I wanted it, and thought I was too cool to give into the trends, or something.

You can see why I've been making hipster jokes throughout. The lady doth protest too much.

So after a few years of being honest with myself that I would probably like it, but the cost was insurmountable, I took the plunge. If you're an audiophile you're probably going to hate this. I bought an Audio-Technica AT-LP60XBT-RD. If that means nothing to you, it's the LP60X model, with Bluetooth compatibility, in red. It's connected via aux cable to the soundbar sound system I bought a few years ago for the tv and game systems. It sounds great! My only practical gripe about the setup is that the soundbar is so directional that if I leave the room I can't really hear it at all unless I really crank up the volume. Since the cat is often snoozing in here, I'd prefer not to. I'm aware I should really use the red and white prong cables that we're all familiar with from 90s gaming systems, but the soundbar doesn't accept those. And I blew too much money on the player, I'm not replacing the sound system until it needs to be replaced, which will hopefully be decades from now.

The stylus is replaceable so I may try to upgrade it eventually, but so far it seems good as well. I've already bought a lot of the tat that goes with this hobby, like dry brushes and a wet-brush cleaning system that looks like a toy water wheel when it's in use.

This will be relevant shortly.

I'm trying to work an aux splitter into the line so I can hook headphones in as well and still sit on the couch, for late nights when my partner is asleep.

Whatcha Hearing?

Apologies to anyone who wasn't on cohost and didn't frequently see the #whatcha reading tags. If you're really interested, last year I started using last.fm again and you can see a widget on the front page of this very site. I'm using Open Scrobbler to track my vinyl plays.

My first purchases, along with the player, were two of my favorite rock albums: Aqualung and Abbey Road, both of which have amazing remasters on vinyl -- though as it turns out, the Tull remasters are better on cd/dvd, because they come with hours of extra stuff, off takes and even totally forgotten songs the band didn't put on the album and promptly forgot about. So fuck me I guess.

But, like anyone who's been listening to music on youtube in the background in the past few years, I've gotten really fond of Japanese jazz from the 70s and 80s, so I've bought a good little stash of Fukui, along with Inagaki's Funky Stuff, Suzuki's Cat, and Kawasaki's Juice -- all, yes, available for free on youtube. Some of the sites that sell these albums in the US embed the full youtube album upload onto the sale page, so you can listen first. I'm sure people with much more disposable income than I have buy albums sight-unseen (ear-unheard?) but I have to limit myself to albums I love, that I'll queue up over and over. I'm waiting on a preorder of High Flying right now, for instance, another youtube algorithm favorite that was rereleased just this month. It's good reading and writing music. The vinyl, the whole thing of having a player, makes the music matter to me more, but it's still sometimes "vibe" music, music I'm listening to as I do something else. I have done the thing where I sit down and just listen to the vinyl, and will continue to. But these vinyls are getting replayed while I play FF14 or read Tolkien.

What did you mean about "an animist buying vinyl, it's been nearly 2000 words now"

What finally made me take the plunge was reading the accounts online of people saying, yes, it's true, the ritual, the physicality, the effort required makes the music more meaningful; it's never "just background noise" even if you do something else. And I've got anxiety, I'm all over the place; this year after having covid sometimes I barely read anything. I thought about it and realized I only really listen to music late at night on headphones when I'm reading fanfic, because honestly you kind of need something else to do while reading fanfic. I've read a fraction of the books I usually read in a year. So the vinyls sounded good to me. And it's true, as it turns out.

I was sitting here, sometime in the past two months, listening to a jazz album and feeling foolish, enjoying myself but still beating myself up for spending all this money and time for something I could get for free (not entirely legally, but who's taking down youtube videos of 50 year old jazz albums?). And I had this thought. It bloomed in my mind unbidden: "of course you're enjoying the music, your friend over there is playing music for you."

Oh yes. I'm an animist. That's right. Ever since recalibrating myself to consciously adapt animism in my life -- as opposed to simply kind of being animist like every person, even atheists who name their computers and talk about the dishwasher being temperamental -- I've been more and more fascinated by tsukumogami, which, if you don't feel like going to wikipedia, is just an idea that items become ensouled if certain things happen. I heard Rassmussen say once that in his experience speaking to people in the global south about their animisms, he was told that a coffee cup is not already a god. But if you enshrine it, and pray to it, and give it offerings, it will become a god. Tsukumogami are kind of like that. I think the traditional form I learned is that if an item or tool is used for 100 years, and cared for properly, it will come to life. Which actually leads to a curse if a craftsman's tools are discarded just short of 100 years of use, as the item almost had a soul and was anticipating that final moment.

Record players are certainly candidates. I must care for mine, making sure the mechanisms stay free of dust. The records themselves must be dusted and sometimes washed (I haven't done that yet, it's going to be a whole day thing I fear). And it's a thing, an entity, in the room, playing music for me. The record and the player work together to make the music happen, and it's physical. It's a person, or it will be. And that relationship I am forming with it, the happiness I feel when I see it, even sitting silently, is a small, compact version of the way I'm happy just seeing my partner or my cat across the room.

If this is a road a little too far for you, there's no need to buy in entirely. William Gibson popularized a term from John Clute, the Tamagotchi Gesture, for something similar. Precisely because we have to spend effort on this device that has been apparently superceded by more high-tech alternatives, we care for it more. And so, we can reason, if we don't have to care for the thing at all, we won't care very much for it's product. How much do I really care for, and feel attachment to, the hundreds or thousands of hours of playlists and ambient music and sfx tracks I've listened to on youtube, as I went about my day? There are a few exceptions, but mostly I play one, let the algorithm take over, and stop it when I want to watch Jeff Gerstmann complain about a baseball game as I eat lunch.

I hope I don't become one of those insufferable people who in fact did prevent me from trying this years ago. I suppose I'd have a much worse turntable if I hadn't waited, but still. I'm not going to end this by saying you absolutely have to do this if you care about music. No you don't. It's perfectly feasible to mindfully listen to a cd, or a cassette, or a music stream. I do think there's a difference between physical media and a stream, but that ties back to the animism, not any significant philosophical stance that I would try to impose on others.

I could bring up physical media and the problems of relying on streaming, but you're already probably familiar; you don't need me to talk about it.

I guess the only way to end is to repeat myself. I made a new friend, doing this. And I hope to help them stick around for many years to come. And that's a good thing, I think. It gives me something to do anyway.

I was broken up about the election news same as anyone else, but that Wednesday I also received my five disk LP set of the VA-11 Hall A soundtrack, so I had something to do that day other than obsess.

1: this is a joke

2: hipsters may die mad: "vinyls" as a plural is a perfectly good regularization of an adjective into a noun, paralleling "cassettes" and "CDs". "Cassettes" is particularly instructive, as it's also the literal media and not the album in question: no one says "cassette tapes," but hipsters insist on "vinyl records." No. And I've got the Ph.D. in English to ignore you if you want to fight about it.