Category: ask us

Arun asks:

Hi O-Dub,

I was wondering if you’re still buying new hip-hop vinyl these days. There were a couple soulstrut threads on how vinyl quality is going down and prices are going up, and Serato makes it easy to spin digital. I could be wrong about this, but it also seems like fewer rap singles are being put out on vinyl.

(Editor’s note: “Thanks” to Ned Raggett, people have been treating this like an article which…it’s not. That said, perhaps I may have overstated some claims so in the interests of toning down some of my “riffing off the dome” hyperbole, I’ve eased up a bit. Original comments now struck through).

All true.

Vinyl quality is going down – not just the quality of the physical vinyl itself but the vast majority some may use non-mastered CDs as their audio source (vs. an original, mastered analog source). To put it another way…if I take a cassette tape and then use that to create a vinyl record…the record isn’t going to sound better than the cassette just because it’s on vinyl. If the source material is lousy, transferring it to vinyl doesn’t suddenly improve the sound. Yet, a lot of (well-meaning) people seem to think that their new vinyl reissue of whatever sounds awesome just because it’s on vinyl but don’t consider (or likely, don’t know) what the audio source of the vinyl was to begin with. Subpar source –> subpar vinyl. I don’t care if you press that sucker on 800 gram vinyl or whatever.

That’s not to say all new vinyl is inferior. There’s plenty of smaller, speciality labels that do due diligence on quality vinyl releases. There are still pressing plants (mostly in Europe) that make quality vinyl. If a label/artist has access to quality analog masters, they can produce a superior results. But sufficed to say, these seem to be are the exceptions, not the rule. (h/t to both Chris Portugal and Andy Zax, who’ve been trying to raise these issues for a while now, mostly to deaf ears).

Also: from a DJing point of view, “original vinyl” isn’t superior to Serato either. The convenience factor of the latter is obvious and bringing vinyl to a gig these days seems more an exercise in providing one’s bonafides, aka “O.G. release, ya bish.” Believe me: I very much get the appeal of that but it’s ultimately about vinyl-as-fetish-object vs. vinyl-as-DJing-material. If we’re talking strictly utility value? New vinyl means very little.

For these reasons and others, rap labels have absolutely slowed down in producing mass quantities of 12″s or LPs on vinyl. The main exception are those cravenly bullshit RSD “limited edition” pressings that people grip and flip thanks to their manufactured scarcity. But if you’re a label and you can distribute a digital lossless version of a song you want DJs to spin vs. spending money to press that same single to vinyl? Labels are already notoriously cheap these days.

For all this, that doesn’t mean I’ve completely stopped buying hip-hop on vinyl but it really comes down to that aforementioned “fetish object” value vs. “I plan on spinning with this.” In a sense, what I elect to get on vinyl is my nod to that single/album’s quality, i.e. “I give enough of a fuck about this release to bother to buy it on vinyl even if it’s probably an inferior pressing.”

Logical? No. But then again, so little of collecting vinyl functions along the lines of logic.

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Eric S. asks:

I was wondering if you think the bubble of highly inflated vinyl prices will burst anytime soon, so I can finally afford some of the pieces I’m currently coveting, or if I’m just gonna have to wait for the reissues, or play crappy vinyl rips (not yours) with serato (if I had serato)?

There’s no simple answer to this since it depends on a few factors, perhaps the most important being: “what genre are we talking about?”

Let me back up a second though. From my (limited) experience, the supply of vintage vinyl is relatively inelastic. For one, you can’t manufacture “old stock.” Second, the higher the demand is on specific genres/artists/etc., the more likely the existing supply will tighten as collectors may be more likely to hold onto desired titles (grip mentality) unless the pricing is attractive enough to flip. Either way, pricing is driven up by both demand and dwindling supply. But, we know that genres come in and out of vogue. As demand falls, not only do prices drop with it but the desire to hold onto certain records may fall too, thus increasing supply, also lowering pricing.

None of this supports the idea that there’s an “inflated bubble” when it comes to records. The phrase suggests there’s something irrational to how certain records/genres grow in value but these are records we’re talking about. What about gripping and flipping 30-40 year old pieces of petroleum products is rational to begin with? To the extent that our interest in records is fueled primarily by emotional desire (rather than pragmatic utility), the vinyl market is bound to be volatile. And yet, despite that, I would wager that the vast majority of records are priced rationally, i.e. “what people are willing to pay for it.” If may be that you (like myself on countless occasions) are annoyed that there are sufficient people willing to pay more for a certain title than we are but that’s not a sign of an irrational market. That’s a sign that we – the more reluctant buyers – are not ready to be players in that market.

In any case, to get back to the core question: it depends on the title, what the actual supply is and whether or not demand is still increasing or has peaked. Moreover, if prices fall because a certain record has gone out of vogue, might that also chill your desire for said record?

For me, there are certain titles that I feel like will always be unattainable on the open market – the supply is too small for pricing to ever fall to where I’d ideally like it – so I hold out the slim hope that I might come across it through other means: that random garage sale we all fantasize about or (more realistically), a misplaced “Buy-It-Now” on eBay, heh. And really, isn’t that the fever dream that fuels us as collectors? Not the simple act of possession but the means of acquisition?

To wit: I don’t have crazy “digging in the field” stories like many other folks I know who’ve spent much more time combing through mold-infused basements and forgotten warehouses, trying to search out that heat. The best I have dates back to 2002, on a record trip through the Midwest I took with two friends. We began in Chicago, then drove down to Indianapolis, then Columbus. We eventually continued onto Elyria, Toledo and ended in Detroit. Between Columbus and Elyria, we had a decision to make: whether or not to drive down to Cincy or hit up Dayton instead. We chose Dayton.

The first store we went to was…ok. Real mom and pop spot and I did get this out of there but nothing remotely crazy. While we were there, my dude Justin talked up the owner and found out there was another store in the area that supposedly stocked vinyl. We drove over and from first appearances, we assumed this was going to be a bust: it sold CDs and pagers and didn’t seem like some vinyl hot spot but we asked anyway and were shown to a back room that wasn’t huge but felt right and sure enough, even though the owners said they could only give us an hour in there because they had close early that day, we managed to find any number of very cool 7″s and LPs, including about half a dozen stock copies of this single:

Over Night Low: Rev Jay.mp3
From 7″ (DeLuxe, 1972)

And look, this isn’t like finding a mythical box of Salts.¹ Back in 2002, this 7″ might have gone for $75-100 under the best of circumstances but it wasn’t something to mortgage your house over. Still, it was one of those “nice, random finds” that fuels our impulse to keep making side trips to Dayton or wherever else the fever takes you.

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Question from Karl: “Back in 2002, I was fortunate enough to interview El-P during the height of Definitive Jux’s fame for my college newspaper. Aside from being extremely gracious with his time and enduring what I’m sure were, in hindsight, relatively inane questions, there was one thing he said which has stuck with me since to this very day. When I asked about his “”guilty listening pleasures,”” he rightly and summarily dismissed the notion, saying if he genuinely liked something, he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Really changed some of my attitudes towards music. What are your views on”guilty listening pleasures,” and assuming you once subscribed to this notion, how and why has it evolved over the years?”

Answer: Through the wonders of text search, it seems that the last time I used the phrase “guilty pleasure” in a Soul Sides post was circa 2006, in reference to this:

Looking through old emails to editors and colleagues, I use the phrase sparingly. Besides the 2006 post, the other most “recent” usage I found dates back to a 2001 email where I applied it to the remix of “Girls, Girls, Girls” by Jay-Z).

For people who frequently write/talk about culture, “guilty pleasure” serves as a useful shorthand for describing “something you like even though you feel self-conscious acknowledging that you like it lest other people find it in poor/questionable taste.” That last part is crucial: the notion of taste is absolutely essential to making a phrase like “guilty pleasure” remotely meaningful to begin with, at least when it comes to culture. Without hierarchies of taste, why would anyone need to feel embarrassed about the kind of music/film/food/books/etc. they like?

So, to answer your question, I think my ultimate abandonment of the term has come through two different realizations:

1) As El-P noted to you, why should anyone feel guilty about liking something that gives them pleasure?¹ Not to get overly philosophical about this but I think part of this stems from a fear of pleasure itself: of acknowledging it, of embracing it, or pursuing it. Pleasure may seem (take your pick): indulgent, frivolous, privileged, soft, et. al.² And as I’ve gotten older, beginning probably around the time I turned 30, I became a lot more self-aware of my hedonistic tendencies and began just embracing them for what they are rather than trying to pretend as if pleasure doesn’t matter to me, let alone something I should feel guilty about enjoying.

2) The second part of it has to do with abandoning – or at least easing off of – judging others around questions of taste. If you haven’t read this, I can’t recommend Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love more highly. It’s a slim book (in other words: a quick read) but an incredibly poignant and profound discussion about musical taste that definitely had an impact on me and other music critics I know. It’s not that I’ve jettisoned the idea of taste for myself – I definitely have preferences in what I like and don’t like – but I’m not interested in applying those preferences to others. So it’s not all that compelling or interesting to me to talk/write about music through the lens of “good taste/bad taste.” I’m interested in figuring out why I like a song. I’m also interested to figure out why others like a song, even ones I don’t like personally. In that context, guilty pleasure is also meaningless because if you’re not invested in policing (or being policed) around questions of taste, then there’s nothing to feel guilty (or self-righteous) about.

Moreover, I also think you arrive at more interesting conversations and ideas once you get past guilt/taste. To explain to someone, “I like that [thing] as a guilty pleasure” isn’t actually an explanation at all. It’s a way of avoiding an explanation. It saves you the trouble of having to actually think and articulate why you like what you like.

I mean, that has its convenient uses; maybe you’re at a painful party and you don’t want to explain to someone why you watched every season of Entourage non-ironically. But if you cease to think of anything as a guilty pleasure, then you’re opening yourself up to thinking more about what the nature of pleasure is, why certain things give you pleasure. And maybe that helps you understand what other people find pleasurable.

So I suppose if I were to interview an artist and I wanted to ask them something similar to what you asked El-P, I would frame it more like: “what’s a song or artist that the other people in Def Jux can’t stand but you love? And why?”

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Question from Argonaut: “As someone trying to send albums out to “press people” what’s the proper way to do so in 2013? Back in day you could send a CD and press release and sometimes you get a review or feature (back when they had magazines) but now its almost worthless to press a physical CD so how do you submit it press. Zip file of the whole album? A streaming link of a song/album? It seems like everyone could just send a soundcloud/bandcamp link so that would just get lost in the shuffle. I have read the submissions on the blog sites and they want MP3s and high quality art so should I just assume all people want that these days? I know that if you have a buzz then people will be checking for it so opportunities are slim to begin with but just trying to decide if I should press this CD or just send out DL/Stream links. I know you know press people so would be interested if you could pose this question to them. Would they prefer the old way a CD/Bio or the new way MP3 stream?”

Answer: I think the format that writers prefer really varies on 1) the writer and 2) their knowledge of the group. If it’s a group I’ve never heard before, then I want to hear 1-2 songs as immediately as possible: embedded MP3 in the email works or, at least, a Soundcloud/Bandcamp link. Youtube links are ok but not ideal, mostly because the sound sucks. If it’s a group I have heard before, then a link to a full zip of the album is preferred since, most likely, I’d be writing about an album and not a song (it depends though).

Personally, I still like CDs because I can take them with me and listen to them in the car directly (i.e. I don’t have to synch my iPhone with the songs). CDs usually included some liner notes or at least a proper one-sheet with info on the release. But these are all carry-overs from the “old days” of how this all worked and since I’m of that generation, it’s more familiar to me. I don’t think that necessarily warrants a band from pressing up full CDs with liners just to make old fogeys like me happier.

Question from Raheem: “”Hi, would you be interested in selling your domain?”

Answer: No.

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