Usually when my tweenage sons ask about relics from my 1990s adolescence – ‘What’s a landline?’ ‘What’s a phone book?’ – we’ll have a good laugh about these obsolete artefacts of the not-so-distant past. But last year when my ten-year-old asked about ‘Immigrant Song’, which he’d heard on the soundtrack to a Marvel movie, and I replied, ‘Oh, I think it’s on the third Led Zeppelin album’, his response left me winded: ‘What’s an album?’
What’s an album? The horror! How had this abject failure of parenting happened? I’ve raised my kids in as analogue a household as possible, with piles of books, newspapers and magazines on every surface. I’ve limited screen time and kept them away from smartphones. And yet…
I think of all the seminal albums that have shaped my life – Patti Smith’s Horses, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Soundgarden’s Super-unknown – and I realise that I have let my sons down very badly indeed.
I blame my husband. Thanks to his Great Digital Leap Forward of 2016-17, when he scooped up every CD we owned (even Graceland, hidden under the service book in my car) and digitised them, there was no physical music in our house. My kids had never seen or held an album; never sat, as I had, going through their parents’ record collection, looking at the artwork, the track listings, trying to figure out all the people on Peter Blake’s cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
What’s an album? The horror! How had this abject failure of parenting happened?
Sure, we play music all the time at home and on the school run, but it’s streamed via Spotify through our iPhones. And like so many aspects of our digital world, Spotify has infantilised us – not just by shortening attention spans but by shifting focus from albums to individual tracks. Now everything has to be a ‘banger’. The algorithm chucks out playlists based on what we’ve listened to: ‘Rock/metal bangers’/‘70s bangers’/‘100 Best Grunge Songs’ etc. It’s even thrown up ‘100 Classical Bangers’. (‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ and ‘Jupiter’ from The Planets, OK, but Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 – really?)
I tried playing full albums on Spotify for my kids, but without much success. ‘Can you skip this one? It’s boring,’ they said of ‘Planet Caravan’ on Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. (Imagine if Ozzy, Geezer & co. had had to sit around thinking about algorithms: ‘Guys, it’s got to be all killer, no filler.’)
So as Christmas approached last year, I decided I needed to buy a record player. An actual record player with a turntable and a needle in a retro walnut finish. It cost a little over £100 and buying it felt counter-cultural – even pioneering. My next stop was Soundclash Records in Norwich, where I spent the same amount again on albums by the bands my sons like (actually paying people for their work comes at a price – imagine!).
On Christmas morning I handed every-thing over with the caveat ‘DO NOT TOUCH THE NEEDLE – EVER’ – sounding exactly, I realise, like everyone’s grumpy dads in the 1980s.
My children’s joy and excitement at the novelty of holding an album in their hands was something else. Listening to a record in its entirety, in the way the artist intended, was completely alien, but it did start to make sense. My eldest son’s current favourite, American Idiot by Green Day, is, after all, a concept album.
I think it actually may be rewiring their brains in some small way – and ours in the process. I’m now replacing my disappeared CDs with vinyl; this is the third format in which I’ve bought several albums, starting with cassettes in the early 1990s. There’s a great pleasure in slipping a favourite record out of its sleeve, placing the needle down – gently! – and turning it over when it comes to the end of that side.
Friends of all ages who come over love that we have a record player. Most children have never seen one. It prompts reminiscences and some interesting conversations, particularly with my boys. ‘Are there any Bob Dylan songs without harmonica in them?’ (I’m still not sure) and, thanks to the Velvet Underground record with the Andy Warhol banana cover: ‘Mummy, have you ever taken heroin?’
Of course, they still fight and squabble and agitate for Roblox, but sometimes I’ll walk in to find them lying around listening to an album – even the ‘boring’ bits – and actually talking to each other.
And we aren’t alone. Figures from the BPI, which represents the British recorded music industry, showed that streaming consumption slowed this year, while LP sales reached their highest level since 1990. While the numbers, in the low millions, are still tiny compared with the streams that Billie Eilish gets per month, it seems that the times, they are definitely a-changin’.
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