Sunday, March 30, 2008

I am an elite white person

Installation # 93 on the Stuff White People Like Blog talks about the average caucasion's large music collection and the inevitable amount of pirated material within it. The post then goes on to delineate 3 levels of the music collector's social hierarchy.


By having a music collection that is mostly vinyl I am clearly in the 'elite' category, my always felt superiority has been given official status. Go whiteboy go!

quoth:

Because of the availability of music online, a very strict social hierarchy has been created within white culture whereby someone with a large MP3 collection is considered “normal,” a large CD collection is considered to be “better,” and a person with a large vinyl collection is recognized as “elite.”

These elite white people abhor the fact that music piracy has made their B-sides, live performances, and bootlegs available to the masses. Their entire life’s work has been stripped of it’s rarity in terms of both object and sound on the record. The best thing you can say to them is: “vinyl still sounds better.”

Well, vinyl always DOES sound better, and there is still a ton of stuff that you can't get on the iTunes music store. Duh.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

The Oldest Record- EVER

As reported in the New York Times, audio specialists have found a way to play back a recording that predates Edison's first cylinder recording by more than 20 years! "Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp." The inventor was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, "a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison." A clip of the recording from 1860 is available with the article, it kinda sounds like what happens when a big fuzz ball gets caught on the end of a phono needle. How long before Jay-Z samples it?