On hipsters, vinyl, and fandom

MANILA, Philippines - I’ve got bad news for hipsters: Astroplus is now selling vinyl. Not just your usual Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, and Adele records, mind you; but also Camera Obscura’s “Underachievers, Please Try Harder,”, Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde,” Cat Power’s “Sun,” and even The Beach Boys’ “Smile.” They’re selling hipster music in a hipster format in a place that also houses the new Chicser CD. I’m not actually sure if this is bad news for hipsters, if vinyl is finally crossing over to the mainstream and if this actually bothers them; I just know that this is certainly news to them, since they’re not the sort of people who go to Astroplus.

Honestly, I have no idea how hipsters think anymore. For all I know, liking the mainstream could be the new thing now, after years of underground snobbism that may have gotten old and uncool by virtue of its ubiquity. Didn’t these people just overreact to the new Miguel/Mariah Carey single as if it was the cure for cancer? We get it, guys: you’re so cool, you can love a mainstream pop song unironically and feel totally secure about it. Stop straining yourselves.

I shouldn’t be mocking hipsters. That used to be one of my favorite hobbies, but I’ve long outgrown it, like that schoolyard impulse of pulling the pigtails of girls I secretly like. I mostly just envy their record collections now. As much as I still hate their clothes and their chillwave-heavy playlists, I’m jealous of their youth, their angst-free exuberance and lack of self-doubt, their financial wherewithal, their access to limitless knowledge of music at their fingertips, and access to not only the most number of records this country has seen in more than two decades, but also to the largest batches of new albums released on vinyl in more than two decades.

Child of the ‘90s

I became an adolescent in the early 1990s, which, in retrospect, seems like one of the most uncool periods in pop music history. Sure, we had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Madchester and Shoegaze; but we also had Michael Bolton, Hair Metal, and a still awkward hip-hop scene that was just a little too MC Hammer-y for comfort. CD was all the rage while cassettes were all I could afford. Instead of an endless stream of indie blogs and websites, there was MTV’s 120 Minutes that we had to wait past our bedtimes to watch once a week, a local “song hits” mag called Rock ‘n Rhythm where you had to leaf through dozens of Warrant and Skid Row lyrics before you could get to a Chapterhouse review, and eight-month-old Spin and Ray Gun magazines that were worth at least two weeks of lunch money.

I began collecting music at a time when vinyl was being phased out and was limited to a handful of elder snobs who began collecting them back when no other format existed. I would love to start collecting them now — I’m just not sure if I’m willing to shell out P4,000 on a Beth Orton record I already own in CD (and bought for a relatively measly 550 bucks). I also know that I’ll just end up feeling like a fraud.

Ironically, it was the advent of CDs that helped usher in the first vinyl renaissance during the 1980s. As a new music format slowly took over, record companies began reissuing their back catalogues, some featuring “bonus tracks” from old singles and b-sides. This opened up a window to an old and forgotten world of 45s, 7-inch singles, and acetates that piqued the interests of a suddenly emerging subculture of rare-music hunters.

Allure of rarity

Today, the popular music format has changed, but the hipster reaction still leads back to vinyl. Yet, the motivation isn’t the same — while it used to be the allure of rarity, it is now the mere seductive imagery of coolness. Let’s face it: in this torrent and YouTube age, you can find a lot of the rare stuff online. What you won’t find there is a long-established cachet of hipness.

The tactile and visual sensation provided by the physical record triggers a certain conception of coolness embedded in our collective consciousness. Serving as the default music format for decades, vinyl was unearthed by the first set of music geeks in the ‘80s who, in their search for lost reggae or Northern Soul releases from the late ‘60s, were unwittingly setting a new symbolic standard that would be immortalized in film and literature and upon which millions of future conforming non-conformists yet to be born were to base their values.

Vinyl records do sound better than any format there is — by definition, an analog rendition of a song sounds fuller, as it is the closest thing you’ll ever hear to its actual recording. But it’s hard to tell from all the “vinyl is back” features that focus on the vintage-ness of it all or the Instagram photos fetishizing those lovely, over-sized album covers. You are less likely to hear someone say, “Oh, this sounds way better than the MP3” than, “Look what I bought” followed by a proud unveiling of the record, the grand four corners of one’s unmistakable indie-cred, painstakingly purchased, visually rendered.

I guess by now coolness is an inseparable part of music fandom (even those old vinyl geeks were as obsessed with bragging about their rare collection as they were about possessing them). And I guess all of us know by now that coolness is nothing but a construction; that authenticity, when chased, can only become inauthentic. This generation happens to be a highly visual one, with its highly visual technologies providing new avenues for old constructions.

As for me, I still wish I had a vinyl collection just so I’d know what a band like Stereolab sounds like in analog. I bet they’d sound at least 10 times cooler.

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@ColonialMental.