VMP Magazine

An instinct to impose a flat surface over a multi-dimensional reality has been a source of human error since the beginning of time. Resisting that instinct is where magic happens.

Tennis have had a lot of flat surfaces placed over their reality, basically since they debuted in 2011. And it’s easy to see why; Tennis are easy to romanticize. A beautiful, young married couple that sails around the world in seemingly unattainable luxury, writing dream-worthy indie rock, being madly in love, waking up with perfect hair? It has to be straight out of a 1940s romance. Tennis’ shiny seafoam surface practically breeds easy misconceptions about who they are or what their music is. But to apply neat and tidy storybook tropes to real human beings would be to miss the boat on Tennis completely.

Since the first person took two Edison cylinders home to their log cabin and put them in the top shelf of their chifferobe, record organization has been a logistical problem for everyone who collects records. Once you seriously start collecting a musical medium — be that MP3s even — how to organize that musical medium in a way that you can find that right song and record at the right time becomes a full time job (well, at least part time, weekends only).

But there’s very little practical advice on how to organize your records. Each record collector is treated as an island: you figure out how to organize your records on your own, without any guidance. So I’m here to help: I’ve assembled 10 different ways to organize your records, and laid out why a person would choose to organize their records that way, and followed that up with which people will find that method most amenable.

So, there’s this episode of The Boondocks. It isn’t for the faint of heart, as the episode was slapped onto television’s banned list, no longer accessible for airing since it’s 2010 premiere. Titled “The Story of Jimmy Rebel,” if you were present for the airing of The Boondocks’ depressingly surreal third season, you know exactly why “Jimmy Rebel” was banned.

Deep in the bowels of Spotify’s digital architecture you’ll find the anonymous, Google-proof artist profile of one “Tanya Swing.” She (or it) has exactly one song to their name: a chintzy karaoke version of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” In 2014 Taylor Swift publicly denounced the presence Spotify and Apple Music in commercial recording, and subsequently purged her discography from those services. In her absence, Tanya Swing has gathered a modest 10,000 plays, presumably driven by people misclicking for the real thing.

Last month, a week before the vinyl record industry celebrated the troublingly overgrown Record Store Day, the BBC published a dubious report claiming that “48 percent of people who bought vinyl [in the previous] month [admitted] they [had] yet to play it.” The article never qualified the poll, conducted by British marketing firm ICM Unlimited, and left a handful of important questions unanswered: how many people were questioned? How old are they? Where do they live? And yet the main takeaway — that nearly half of people currently buying records aren’t listening to them — remains an entirely believable possibility. For plenty of consumers in the current market, records are things you hold as much as things you listen to, trophies for fanship as much as a means of consumption.

When the Rapture released Echoes in 2003, the burgeoning online music media hailed it as a watershed moment for fine-tuned polyglot taste. No more did the underground consist only of slack-jawed white men and guitars! Now it can include slack-jawed white men with synthesizers too. In Amy Granzin’s blurb for the record on Pitchfork’s 2000’s decade list, she wrote “Echoes ordered indie kids to drop their genre boundary-drawing chalk and start taking beatmakers and synth-players seriously. [It] paved the way for Justice, MGMT, Hercules and Love Affair, and a host of other independent-minded dance acts.”

In a scene from 2016 awards-season darling La La Land, aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) unexpectedly runs into struggling jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) at a party and realizes he’s been comically reduced to playing in a 1980s cover band. She requests A Flock of Seagulls’ new wave classic “I Ran,” much to his obvious discomfort. Later, when Sebastian confronts Mia, he protests, “But requesting “I Ran” from a serious musician – it’s too far.” It’s a deftly comic scene, but it raises a larger question: what, precisely, makes “serious musicians” spurn ’80s pop’s characteristically synth-driven sound?

“As hip hop… blossomed into the radiant center of youth culture, a lot of white kids found in it a way to flee their own orderly world by discovering a sexier, more provocative one.”

“When rock was young, in the 1950s, it was swarms of young girls in the audience that first registered the impact of those songs, artist, and records, and made for cheerfully unruly live shows,” music journalist Ellen Sander wrote in the preface of her seminal, first-hand account of rock’s heyday, titled Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties. She continued, “Most of the hits were lovelorn songs about or addressed to the girls. Girls were the reason for rock ’n’ roll.”

In December, members of Vinyl Me, Please Essentials will receive an exclusive deluxe edition of Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, the singer’s breakthrough album. This new edition was remastered all-analog from the master tapes by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound and pressed on pink and purple swirl vinyl at GZ. You can sign up to receive it here.

To celebrate our reissue, we're republishing this essay written in March of 2017, before Aretha's death, when I Never Loved A Man turned 50.

Beginning in the 1940s and throughout the ‘60s, listening to American music in Soviet Russia was a defiant act of consumerism. The music itself—popular recordings from Lionel Richie, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and more—was banned, written off as subversive to the state, and the method of consumption was correspondingly sketchy. Stephen Coates, a British author and composer, grappled with the peculiarly fascinating black market for bootleg records in his 2010 hardcover book X-Ray Audio. Russian bootleggers pressed songs onto used x-ray film, a material with the unique properties required of a vinyl alternative: soft enough for grooves to be carved, firm enough for grooves to hold their shape.

The forbidden songs were pressed onto leftover images of bones—a hand here, a section of a tibia there—like incidental picture discs borne out of necessity. It’s a dramatic, alluring story about the hunger for music. And while it’s an extreme case, the story of Russian “bone records” offers up a weighty microcosm: people go to great lengths to listen to music they’re not supposed to.

When you start listening to jazz, if you’re completely unaware (if you’re like me), then you start with the ubiquitous Kind of Blue. It’s the standard that defined the standard, a master work, a relic of a style that has sadly — ironically — been relegated to the lifeless catacombs of shopping malls and elevators in many cases. It’s the music we listen to in-between things, while we’re waiting, without any real attention. And it’s a shame, because jazz, above all else, demands attention.

“Birdie darling, it’s Mike. Well, hun, our big trip is about to begin. I don’t know how to say it—I’m not exactly scared, but the thought of not seeing you anymore… Well you can’t talk about what will happen. I want to tell you that I love you truly, hun, I really do.”

It’s something you don’t notice, until you do, and then can’t not notice. Call it, “Now Abuse”—the habit many singers have of ending random phrases with “now.” Saying “now” might not make sense in relation to the rest of the song, but many singers say it anyway. You hear it all the time. It’s like a person who says, “you know,” after just about everything.

“Kafka was really insecure. You know?” “The triangle is an important shape. You know?”

Once you hear it, you can’t stop hearing it. “Now” is a musical “you know.” Here are a few classic examples.

In the aftermath of a particularly grueling year, music’s potential as a vehicle for empathy seems more vital than ever. Yet in addition to solace, contemporary music is also providing a furnace for rebellion—especially to the nation’s alternative and indie rock scenes, which have lately been returning to a more lo-fi, consciously DIY sound. It seems fitting, then, that some of today’s most brilliant artists in the genre are Asian-American women, figures long relegated to the fringes of creative culture—namely Mitski, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, and Japanese Breakfast.

“Wouldn’t it be weird to be a cook?,” asks producer Shawn Everett as an episode of Chef’s Table plays on a giant screen behind a mixing desk.

It’s a freezing Friday night in Melbourne, and Shawn is talking about the idea of art as legacy in a small studio hidden in the backstreets of the inner-city suburb of Northcote. He’s working against the clock on an album called Time Is Golden, and it’s like nothing this Grammy-winning producer has ever experienced before – or likely will again.

“Cooks work their whole life perfecting something,” he continues while a sous chef carefully plates some micro-herbs in the background. “And then after you die it’s gone.”

Not so long ago, it felt like indie rock drove the discourse around music on the internet. Now, the Indie Rock Blog Hype Era is as gone as the Roman Empire. What happened?