Robert Pollard
“Rud Fins” b/w “Piss Along You Bird”
2007, Happy Jack Rock Records
The year is 2007 and if you’re of Generation X vintage (or older), the music industry is mutating into something different from what you knew before.
Record stores are dying off. The venerable Tower Records chain closed late last year in 2006, which is a big deal. It’s normal for people around you to say that they don’t pay for music anymore. Some of them are outright hostile to the idea.
If you still enjoy buying and owning records, somebody in a warm home near you thinks that you’re an idiot. You’re too dumb to know that you can get music for free now. Either that or you’re some backwards ass who lives in denial of the revolutionary new way.
At this same time, the vinyl comeback quietly percolates. You can’t buy it from Target or Amazon yet. Secondhand prices are still reasonable. Most record stores that are holding up remain dominated by CDs, but the occasional news article comes out about how LP sales are ticking upward while CD sales are ticking downward. It’s also suddenly common for new LPs to come packaged with a slip of paper with a code for a digital download, which solves that old problem of “I want to buy vinyl, but I hate that I can’t play it in my car”.
(The first album that I can remember that addressed this issue was Shellac’s 1000 Hurts in 2000 on Touch & Go. The vinyl floated a CD copy in the sleeve like it was no big deal, like it was a cheap giveaway in a cereal box. This was a major topic of discussion at the time.)
It was 2007 when a younger co-worker labeled me a “hipster” because I was into collecting records (and had been for about ten years). We were generally friendly and I don’t remember what my retort was to this twerp, who liked some cool music and proudly pirated everything, but it was one of those little moments that showed me that I’d gone out of sync.