Music Discussion and Information

1991.

Still have the show flyer I painstakingly removed from a telephone pole (remember doing that?).

Plonked it in a $1 shop frame. Maybe I'll take a picccie once I cow to societal mores and get dragged into civilisation and actually get a stupid cellphone

What Generations Are Buying What?

At the record store today and vendor had just thrown away 1,000 LP's. "Paul Anka, Ventures, Elvis..."

As an ex-vendor, I can understand. You just get sick of lookign at that same stuff languishing unloved in the dollar bin for years on end.

Got me thinking about generational changes in music. Who is listening to what? The oldies that bought the Ventures records clearly aint buying records any more. Those people are literally dying. What do kids in their 20's buy? They should be the goddamn peak music consumers... but they aint buying, theyre listening to a shitty stream of 5% of the actual song on youtube via their stupid fucking phones?

As an old git in his 50's, my wheelhouse was the 90's. COWS. STEEL POLE BATHTUB. UNSANE. FUGAZI. You know, the good shit. What about people now in their 30's? They were in elementary school then. Do they buy STEEL POLE BATHTUB records? I don't think they do... that 90's cohort of bands are picked up by gits in their 50's arent they. Where am I going with this post? I dont know. It just weirded me out that vendor dude chucked 1,000 lp's that 15, 10, 5 years ago someone wouldve surely wanted to buy. I wonder if the deadening of online sales (discogs) is linked to this generational shift as well and not just stupid phones and stupid youtube. They tell us "vinyl record sales are up" worldwide. Really? Let me guess, the dinosaurs, Zep, Beatles, Stones. Is this tiny clutch of old git bands the only ones that have traversed across generations to young people's ears? 


--Confused of Onehunga.

while we're talking vinyl, has anybody notice the price of them recently? i dunno about japan or vietnam. but here in the free west the price of records [and any associated postage] has made buying them an expensive indulgence for gen x bankers, trust fund kids and the bourgeoisie. checking them off 'the best albums of all time' lists to decorate their zoom meeting feature walls. fuck them and everything they stand for. cheap record is good records was my collecting moto...and they barely exist anymore. i'm done.

I rememebr reading some of his stuff in the 90's. Bugger me, if he's still around his brain must be going potty with the shit going down these days. 

Yeah I guess one thing I'm clumsily wondering is, eg, do any kids in their 20's buy "underground" bands LP's we went gaga for in the 90's? If they stumble across an affordable OBLIVIANS or JESUS LIZARD or UNWOUND lp do they celebrate wildly or is it just no-fucks-given ancient history to them? Would they be curious about buying a copy cos it looks weird and cool? Or maybe they'd just look it up on youtube and walk out of the store, listening to it on there for free....

Great call. In the empty, insular fiefdom of my mind I totally overestimate how big "underground" music is

Holy crap, Saigon doesnt have record shops?

The irony is me and probably a lot of people started buying records because they were cheap! When CDs were $16 and Napster was shut down (okay my timeline might not be airtight but whatever) $2 copies of Costello, Talking Heads, Police, etc, was a pretty attractive way to hear that stuff. For young people today that incentive is entirely gone. Also, and I know I am not the first person to observe this but when everything is available, for free, immediately, it becomes somewhere between overwhelming and meaningless. Who cares, it'll always be there.

For a young person getting "into" vinyl I see why they'd focus on the 60's 70's - that's when the stuff was made with quality every step of the way. I'm sure there are a lot of good and good-sounding records from the 90s on but there are also a lot that just sound like shit even if the content is pretty good.

To get into record buying as a young person today would be pretty difficult. Figuring out what you even want to buy and then avoiding the red herring of $45 180 gram reissues of common titles already requires a kind of genuinely nerdy approach, probably not dissimilar from collecting old video games or toys or whatever other nerd ass shit is out there.

I think there are some but very few kids in their 20s buying those underground 90s bands, and even if they are, if they haven't got the late 70s stuff yet then what the hell are they doing? Maybe my personal bias...

I grew up hearing stuff that was current then and loved a lot of it but when I heard the late 70s stuff a switch flipped and I realized at least 1/2 of the current stuff I just never needed to hear again.

I also think all these old people dressing their kids in hilarious Ramones and Misfits shirts and trying to get them to listen to that shit are going to ensure it is perceived and irrelevant parent music and make damn sure those kids never form guitar-based bands...

average cost of a new lp in australia is $40+ when i was in nz last year it was more like $50+

showing my age here. i started buying records in 1970 there was a rack each of 7"s and lp's near the checkout in the local supermarket. the era of vinyl as the medium of the people. 99cents for singles $2.99 for lps. it was all top 40 stuff, but the top 40 then could include everything from smokey robinson and the miracles to black sabbath and ktel comps. my brother and i used to bug my mum to buy us at least one 7" every week when she was doing the grocery shopping.

but...the golden age for buying cheap vinyl for me, was in the early '90s when cds really started to take over as the medium of choice. vinyl collectors were selling their whole collections as old stuff started being reissued on the new digital miracle format. and the secondhand bins in sydney were overflowing to the point where they started stacking lp's waist high on the floor in the aisles. no sorting into genres, eras etc. it was was just dumped there together. if you were prepared to take a few hours digging through all the usual secondhand discards, you could pick up anything from mint original pressing of kraut,'60s garage and psychedelic, punk rock, soul, jazz, avant garde and anything else you can possibly imagine. priced to move quick, everything between $1 and $9 depending on condition only, nothing to do with collectability, because there was no fucking market for the shit. nobody except a handful of weirdos and dole bludgers like myself would be seen dead buying anything but the amazing shiny, space saving, unbreakable, crystal clear sound of the new miracle format, that would consign vinyl records to the historical scrap heap along with 78's, wood burning stoves and penny farthings. yes indeed friends, that was the golden age for buying vinyl.

  Yeah, that was the same for me, and I was living in LA so add-in tons of music biz and associated people dumping crap. Rhino Records in Westwood would have monthly parking lot sales with things priced at .25 cents that were madhouses and kinda put me off, the regular used bins were already full of buyables for just a few bucks, but my "music slut" friend would come away with milk crates for a hundred bucks or whatever - from Sabbath to James Brown to Mahavishnu Orchestra. My parents gave me a CD player for my uni graduation in 1989 and I kinda berated them! For the longest time, my only CD was a Cocteau Twins because Forced Exposure had said it was the only thing worthwhile for the format. Graduation also meant I started getting credit card offers nearly daily, and well, thank god they actually write that shit off your credit history. I remember mail ordering from Au Go-Go and Oz albums were already pricey then, and add in postage...
I'm in here for a second but record store employee and Spanish IV classmate Jon Liu can be seen headbanging stage-left...

there were three large secondhand record shops side by side in pitt st sydney ashwood, the pit and lawson's. but ashwoods was the largest and most unruly. three floor of records crammed into every available space. they used to write the price on the actual record label, so there could be no switching or profiteering.

yep, i got dozens with the price scrawled over the printed song list and everything...i kinda like it, reminds me of the fucken cheapskate i am

Disk Union does this religously. All other stores in Japan, still virtually never.

Some stores I've been going to for 25 years still have the exact same copies of the more unwanted 80's titles by Kool and the Gang, War, etc, still unwavering priced at the same 2,800 yen they were in 1995. Now available to anyone in Japan with internet access on discogs for $1.

That was the real gamble back then. If you wait, you might get it cheaper. Or, you might not get it at all. I guess this just happens faster online now. Speaking of which I bought like every fucking Sparks record when I worked at that store and my wife recently decided she needs a copy of Angst In My Pants. She's right it's a good one. At the time I just thought well honestly, when is the last time I listened to Kimono, or Propaganda, or Indiscreet, or No 1 in Heaven, do I really need this? Well it was $5.99 and I definitely should have bought it because it seems unavailable for less than $40 now.

cunts.

See movie thread for my thrilling review of Annette.