I’m writing this article on a typewriter, by candlelight, while I sup coffee from a mason jar. I’ll be using a Polaroid SX-70 to take the accompanying photos. Once it’s finished, I’ll rise from my vintage upcycled chair, pause briefly to wax my ironic moustache, and remove splinters from my posterior before jumping on my penny farthing and cycling to the office to submit it. That’s right – I’m a hipster with a low-tech fetish that’s supposed to spark a new dawn of nostalgic revivalism: Adopt the shoddy, outdated junk that I spend every waking moment seeking out, or risk being sneered at. (Actually, if too many of you find the same things charming, then I’ll move on because it’s not okay to like anything “lamestream.”)
Seriously though: What is with adopting long forgotten technology that doesn’t work very well? Idealizing the seventies or eighties seems like something only someone who never lived through them could do. We mass produced all kinds of incredibly wasteful rubbish back then. As a writer, I would never sit down and write an article with pen and paper, nor would I use a typewriter anymore. You know why? It’s because they are uncomfortable, impractical, and drastically inferior to using a word-processing program on a computer or laptop.
Tech from the analog age is dead for a reason. We developed superior tech. That nostalgic imperfection you find in old Polaroid or those scratchy vinyl recordings can be replicated in digital form if you have a genuine longing for something that reminds you of childhood or makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
“We did it first”
No, no you didn’t. Stop and think about how that antiquated product, clothing, or facial hair style, came onto your radar. It’s because at one time it was considered viable by the general population. You are basically filtering for rejected awfulness. I can turn a blind eye to skinny jeans, big sunglasses and trucker hats. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather never see any of those things again, but I’ve come to terms with my complete lack of power over the fashion world.
What I can’t abide is people using impractical antiquated tech and pretending like there’s something great about it. Gigantic power-guzzling TVs with thick beveled glass screens were just rubbish. Ugly, cheap, plastic stereo units with hundreds of knobs and buttons are like the consumer tech equivalent of the 1970s tower block architecture that still blights the UK. Record players were a pain to use and vinyl took up loads of room, usually getting scratched while it did so. Physical books kill trees.
And don’t even get me started on the rash of faux-vintage products and apps that are flooding the shelves of boutiques in all the right neighborhoods around the globe. An obsession grasping for authenticity and nostalgia for a past that is somehow more real than the digital present renders an iPhone dock shaped like a rotary telephone and 75 percent of Instagram filters null and void.
Fake nostalgia
Speaking of nostalgia (and speaking to the under-30 leading edge of this annoying trend), it’s not possible to be nostalgic for something you never experienced the first time around. If you don’t know firsthand the misery audio cassettes getting eaten by your boom box or your floppy disks or the heartache of a love letter lost by the postman, then you’re just being different for the sake of it and the quickest way is to dig through humanity’s landfill. Forget about applying creativity toward something new, just backdate your conformity.
As for those of us with a legitimate claim to the tech of the 70s and 80s that’s so ascendant, I acknowledge the comfort of a nostalgic haze, but I ask: do you really want to trade your phone in for a Sports Walkman and a landline? Really?
I’m not the nostalgia police, but I am telling low-tech-loving hipsters everywhere to stop waxing their mustaches for a moment and think. It shouldn’t be difficult to look like you’re not trying. Why make life harder? Just because something is old or outdated does not mean it is cool (see Nazism, medieval medicine and outdoor toilets). Embrace new technology, forget the analog age, let antiquated tech die a dignified death, and focus on the horizon. With some proper damned sunglasses please.
[Image credit: Tube TV: LesPalenik/Shutterstock; Cassette: Shawn Hempel/Shutterstock]
I am 62. When I started college, I happened upon a very large stash of my parents’ and grandparents’ 78s, some dating from the WWI era, about 200 in all. I went out and found myself a wind-up, spring-driven “Victrola,” for 8 bucks in a Salvation Army store. The records were scratchy, the sound quality was barely acceptable, the styluses were about the diameter of a ball point pen tip that came to a point. But it was a hell of a lot of fun, we had dance parties that rocked to swing music, and my friends and I have never forgotten that recapturing of our ancestral past. About 6 years ago, the Victrola was sitting in my brothers’ garage and he wanted to make room for something or other. I had to move it to my place in Manhattan. When unloading it, some guy comes up to me and says, “Hey, you wanna sell that?” I got $800 for it. The writer of this article ought to loosen up, and anyone who wants to listen to analog recordings, knock yourself out and enjoy. Enjoyment is the key to life, not this crimped, crouching, small-hearted view of what’s cool, not cool, right or wrong. Plow your own fields, kids. Peace and love.
Instead of writing this article, you could’ve written one about record companies destroying all popular music since the late ’90s with dynamic compression. To make recordings “louder”, record companies have ruined millions of them. Sound quality peaked in the early ’90s; ask recording engineers.
It’s not just new recordings that have been destroyed; record companies are busily “remastering” their back catalogs and ruining generations’ worth of music FOR NO BENEFIT. They’re remastering FULL DIGITAL recordings. There’s simply no excuse.
Educate the public about the loudness war and why it’s the all-time biggest crime against music, and one of the worst offenses against art ever.
^This.^ I would be willing to concede that much of the perceived superiority of records (in many cases) may be in part due to the iterative and subjective nature of the mastering process, in which the engineer must often listen to multiple test pressings before arriving at the final product, while (in many cases) the CD transfer may have been approached less rigorously. This “before” considering the wholesale destruction of music engendered by the “loudness war,” about which I have ranted on numerous forums, on Facebook, and to anyone who would listen. Even though an old fart, I might want to buy some modern stuff sometime if it sounded half decent. A friend lent me an Arcade Fire CD; I liked it but the sound was all buzzy & sibilant. A quick peek at the waveforms showed why. I went on a limb and bought the LP, made a digital copy and compared in Audacity; the CD had the top 6 dB just clipped off, everything just crammed to max level. And this is by no means the worst example as a quick web search will demonstrate. Same friend lent me a Black Keys disc. I really want to like it but the sound gives me a headache. Sorry, a lost sale for them…
And as you say, it extends to recordings that were once released with better quality. No excuse for it. Any modern mp3 player can adjust its gain so that everything plays at a similar perceived level.
But mp3s are a whole nother ball of wax. Once you’ve chopped off all transients, ignored “masked” tones, and added wildly shifting dither noise, there’s no way to recover decent sound. Anyone can do this simple experiment using free audio editing software: rip a CD track to (lossless) wav or flac, then to mp3. Bring them both up in your editor, invert the lossless, and mix the two (this will cancel everything that is the same between the two.) The result will be a shocking mess of what is removed and what is added by the mp3 encoding process. On anything more complex than a sine wave, the artifacts will sound quite nasty.
Records might sound better because they can’t clip the audio without some serious damage to the sound. I challenge people to take a listen to CD masters from the ’80s after they figured out not to use vinyl masters and before the loudness war kicked in. Bad Company’s self-titled album comes to mind. Hotel California is another good old master that sounds loads better than its new DVD-A garbage counterpart. The DVD-A was recorded straight from the master tapes at 24/192, but they allowed clipping. What a waste. Rumours by Fleetwood Mac is another example where the old release sounds better than the new high-rez clipped garbage they recently released. You don’t need anything more than 16/44.1 or 16/48 if the producer or engineer knows WTF they are doing. I won’t even listen to any album that had Rick Rubin had a hand in. Death Magnetic being the main one. Californication being another. I have since procured the Guitar Hero version of the former, and the “unmastered” version of the latter. It’s a shame that now that we have awesome ADC and DAC technology that the music sounds like ASS because we’ve abandoned actual engineers for idiots who just look for the loudest poppy sound.
This article is ridiculous. Many of the “vintage” objects this writer talks about are creative tools used for making art, music and literature. This article seems to be hung up on hipsterism and there is a definite anger element that clouds the actual issues of validity of many of these objects. Chemical process photography will never be replaced by digital technology. They don’t even compare…so you cannot say one is better than the other. They are totally different. It would be like saying acrylic paint is better than oil paint, therefore an artist shouldn’t use oils anymore. Same with sound technology. Digital sound technology is a totally separate and different tool than analog. Analog tape produces sound qualities that simply cannot be mimicked by digital recording. Digital is a valid and great tool…and so is analog. I do have to argue that, as a music lover, vinyl records are way better sounding than mp3s and CDs. That is a personal opinion. I also love the convenience of mp3s though.
This article is really weird. Why are you so hung up on a small subculture of hip kids who have a fetish for older stuff? Who cares? And what about the advantages of reusing the vast amount of things we’ve produced over the last century, instead of being such a “throw away” culture? It seems like a win-win situation to me, for the many people who enjoy analog age technology and for the environment. I love new technology, and I think there are some amazing creative tools available. But to say that older technology is irrelevant and useless and inferior…well, that is a small-minded and quite ignorant argument. Lighten up on those hipster kids. And take some time to really look at photographs and really listen to music. Maybe you’ll change your mind a little. I doubt it though. Anyway, back to my morning jazz records. I’m going out to shoot some fall colors with my SX-70 later today. :)
1. Vinyl is BY FAR the superior method of reproducing the full spectrum of what the human ear can hear, plus both subsonic and supersonic frequencies that are felt and sensed, even though not as sound. (The perfect example: Take a look at a vinyl recording of the 1812 Overture with actual cannons used. The cannon fire is easy to find on the disc. The grooves are in gigantic (i.e. less than 20 Hz) waveforms. The human body feels the cannon (and the bass drum) as much as it hears it, and the CD and even SA-CD standards do not reproduce any waves below 20 Hz or above 20K Hz. By definition, the greatest SA-CD (or any digital standard) on the greatest stereo with the greatest speakers will be an inferior reproduction of a vast sonic field when it was recorded in analog and contains subsonic and supersonic frequencies (like an orchestra using cannon might).
2. Secondly, who cares if typewritten material kills trees? Trees grow back. They’re a completely renewable resource for building, paper, and many other uses. Don’t show your ignorance and the ease with which you’ll allow yourself to get pulled into dogma rather than being a researcher and learning facts.
Otherwise. Cool. What I’ve never understood goes into even further depths. For example, my generation (b.1961) and the previous generations spent a trillion dollars to build a telephone network that works 99.99999% of the time, carries its own damn power, works even when the electricity is out, and has sonic clarity allowing one to speak with someone in China, understand everything, and still hear a pin drop. But the kids seem to be perfectly fine with, or even prefer, a mobile network that drops calls, still isn’t duplex, and has at least 50% of all conversations still containing the phrase “Are you still there?”. I don’t get it.
Second example: Television: Our generations built and subsequently allowed the Asians to build, giant HD televisions of 60, 70, 90 inches of near-perfect resolution, brilliance, and color. This was important for both sports and television drama. But here’s what I don’t understand: The kids now prefer to watch their “television” (for lack of a better term) on 2″ screens on their phones, with herky-jerky video. And, the kids have almost zero desire to be entertained by any television fare whatsoever that could, even by OUR terms, be considered to be dramatic, well-written (if written at all), funny, or emotional. The 75 year effort to perfect television has come to a generation that couldn’t care less.
Finally, music. I’m not even going to bother with whether today’s music is any good or not. But it’s the same thing. OUr generations worked for 100 years to perfect and improve sonic quality, and the ability to reproduce music in the home to as close as possible to what it might sound like live. Today’s kids don’t even realize that MP3 is a compressed version of music that has deliberately removed a load of the sound quality. And they wouldn’t notice anyway. They listen to their music on TELEPHONES. The billions of research dollars spent to make music reproduceable at a reasonably affordable price that comes so close to LIVE have now been entirely wasted! The kids can’t tell the difference, and wouldn’t care even if they could.
This isn’t even just hipster. It’s a bizarre, strange, and somewhat disturbing trend in our society away from excellence and toward mediocrity, ostensibly in the name of convenience, but anthropologically and sociologically speaking, I fear that it’s much worse.
perspective is another lost art as well, but you, johhny devoid, seem to have been able to hold on to a bit of it! kudos.
You’re full of crap and are another ignoramus who just doesn’t understand how digital sampling works, at all. Digital audio can reproduce “subsonic” frequencies just fine. The bottom shelf being 20 Hz is just inaccurate. A DAC can spit out DC voltage if you want it to. Oh, and a DAC can also reproduce the upper limit of hearing just fine. Vinyl cannot. High frequencies on a record are played back full of noise.
The author is obviously just angry because he cannot grow a proper mustache. Negative remarks against this form of facial hair are interspersed throughout the article leading me to believe that the author associates vinyl and the other mentioned technology with mustaches. Rather than write an article about his mustache deficiency, he has directed this angst elsewhere.
Vinyl will forever bee the best music format in my opinion …not every one likes to follow trends
I own a Well-Temprered turntable I purchased around 12 years ago. I’ve been purchasing records around that long. I own around 1200. And I also listen to CDs and music I’ve download on the net all the time. I prefer vinyl in general, more texture to the sound, mostly. And some records do sound better than the digital versions I have, the sound quality depends on the care each production team took when they produced the music. But some digital versions sound wondrous and terrific, and magical, it all depends.
And, I also have and use film camers, but the cameras I have make the Polaroid SX-70 the joke that it is.
Now, when I meet someone 30 or under who happens with the same interests, am I supposed to reject them as hopeless ‘hipsters’? How silly.
We are all creatures of the past, you and I are made of the past, things of the past are a part of you, you can’t reject them, no matter how much you try. The universe we see when we look out with the most powerful telescopes we have is the universe the way it looked in the past, not how it looks now.
Both analog and digital products have been and are being made and are being used by you and I with insanely destructive fossil fuels at this moment. Let’s see if your generation can clean up the greenhouse gases in the air and oceans and save this planet for human habitation; It perhaps is time for you to stop wasting yours and help it to happen instead of complaining.
That “texture” is called noise. You are among the weirdos who keep comparing apples and oranges. Nothing is ever done to ensure that both an analog version and digital version have the same master. There are sacrifices that have to be done to a master just to cut it on vinyl, and all of them are things that lessen quality. I won’t even get into your last portions of your hip[pie/ster] emo eco-fascist drivel.
Music is a form of entertainment – if you get more entertainment one way, and I get it another way – then we both are entertained! This is people making the most of their downtime – not finding a cure for cancer, world geopolitics, etc. If someone gets great pleasure listening to yodeling though an old cardboard tube – why should anyone spend time trying to tear him or her down? Just do what you want how you want and let the rest of the world sort itself out.
And if someone doing something different than you – regardless of the technology employed or the method they enjoy it – and it detracts from your enjoyment – might I suggest that it is not them that is the problem?
The name of this article is awkward at best. “why dinosaurs and mammoths should stay dead and why polar bears should join them.” Wouldn’t polar bears have to already be dead in order to also “stay” dead? Then there isn’t a problem, EH? And why do people even get so mad about hipsters, anyhow. They keep junk useful instead of letting it find the landfill, and seem to mind their own snotty business. What about, like, terrorists or something? This article and this comment have joined together to make sure that the last 15 minutes of my life “stay dead.”
You, sir, are an asshole. It’s an experience, it’s not anything practical, it’s a wholesome, deep sentimentality that appreciators of the old ways get. It’s the pride you get when you’ve split your own damn firewood with an axe, when you’ve used your own damn legs and stayed in kickass shape by biking everywhere. Is it necessary to keep the old alive? Maybe not. But it has it’s place. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be listening to classical music (it’s been “replaced” in great part by all the music to come since it’s heyday), everyone would’ve dived into adopting touchscreens over mice/trackpads for computers, etc, etc.