Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters by Paul E. Winters

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters by Paul E. Winters J. Martin Vest (bio) Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters. By Paul E. Winters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2016. Pp. 208. Hardcover $80. In the 1980s, commentators pronounced the vinyl record dead. After more than eight decades of continuous play, it appeared, the flat black musical disc had wound down. Hardly had the world's turntables stopped spinning, however, before there began murmurings of a vinyl resurgence. Beginning in the 1990s and then accelerating dramatically in the new century, discerning listeners turned from CDs and sound files to re-embrace the seemingly archaic technology of vinyl. In Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters, Paul E. Winters asks why it is that "despite the best efforts of the recording industry and its confederates in the electronics industry, the consumption and collection of vinyl records not only never went away," but also "continues to grow and to thrive in the new millennium" (p. xv). In pursuit of an answer, he ranges across a wide arc of sound recording history, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, and draws on sources as varied as industry publications, record-collectors' periodicals, and his own ethnographic explorations of internet culture. The book's seven chapters forego strict temporal organization, offering instead what the author characterizes as various "angles of approach" to the question of vinyl's resurgence (p. xv). Chapter one details the role of "fidelity" in constructing new types of listening subjects who take for granted the objectivity or the "thingness" of recorded sound (pp. 20–21). In chapters four and five, Winters explores vinyl consumption's status as a subversive "counter-discourse" before turning to the industry's attempts to capitalize on those same subversive patterns of thought and consumption with box sets, reissues, and similar offerings. Chapter six examines the exacting rituals of audiophilia which, Winters argues, work as a "disciplinary mechanism" on the listening subject. In collecting, storing, displaying, cleaning, and playing their prized vinyl, audiophiles create for themselves a world (p. 130). In doing so, Winters argues, they also affirm a discourse of "fidelity" that posits an independent and objective existence [End Page 654] for mechanically-reproduced sounds outside the self (p. 123). Chapter seven extends these insights to consider how online forums such as the YouTube Vinyl Community Facebook page facilitate vinyl records' roles as agents of self-fashioning and community construction. Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age is most provocative, however, when it turns to vinyl's entanglements with popular culture and memory. In chapter two, Winters limns a media history of the Beatles through their first CD issues in 1987 to the band's iTunes debut in 2010 and vinyl reissues in 2012 and 2014 (pp. 25–27). Because the (later) Beatles approached recording as an art in itself (p. 33) employing overdubs, tape loops and electronic vocal manipulation (p. 40), it is impossible, Winters argues, to speak of pre-mediated "original" performances of those recordings (pp. 40–42). Consequently, the Beatles' vinyl records—their original format—accrue the "aura" Walter Benjamin denied altogether to mechanically reproduced art (p. 33). In the following chapter, Winters identifies in vinyl's resurgence an assertion of humanity in the face of dehumanizing modern (digital) culture. "For vinyl listeners," he argues, "it is the very imperfections of the technology that help create the rituals that constitute the authentic, listening subject, which they perhaps connect with a prelapsarian, more innocent time" (p. 57). Scholars of technology might wish for more technical granularity in some parts of Winters's account, and the book would have benefited greatly from a concluding chapter (it ends with a two-page afterword). Most readers, however, will find in Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age a useful discussion of one technology's cultural biography. The work broaches important questions and will serve as a point of departure for future scholarship in the history of sound media. J. Martin Vest J. Martin Vest is a lecturer in the University of Michigan department of...