Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, Vol 3, No 1
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Attias DC Vol 3, No 1 (2011): Special Issue on the DJ TABLE OF CONTENTS Reading Tools Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Meditations on the... Culture, Vol 3, No 1 (2011) Attias HOME ABOUT LOG IN REGISTER SEARCH CURRENT ARCHIVES NEWS Review policy How to cite item Home > Vol 3, No 1 (2011) > Attias Indexing metadata Print version Notify colleague* Font Size: Email the author* SEARCH JOURNAL MEDITATIONS ON THE DEATH OF VINYL All BERNARDO ALEXANDER ATTIAS California State University, Northridge This work is And vinyl is dead; it's dead. It's gonna be a special item for collectors, and probably licensed under a Creative will exist forever in that way, but that's it. It's over. You can really count on two hands Commons Attribution- who's carrying vinyl bags around the world. It's dinosaurs like Sven Vath or Ricardo Noncommercial-Share Alike Villalobos, and for them it's great because that also makes them special. But at the 3.0 License. same time, no one really gives a shit anymore. You have to feel comfortable with what CLOSE you use, whether it's vinyl, CDs or any digital gadget (DJ Ali Schwarz of Tiefschwarz, * Requires registration quoted in Golden 2010). While this was definitely not the first time that the "death of vinyl" had been announced in the history of recorded music, there is little question that 2010 marked an important technological crisis in electronic dance music history, particularly for the DJ. Vinyl DJ culture had already been taking a beating from the increasing popularity among DJs of compact discs and computer-based systems, and at the end of 2009, Pioneer announced the release of the CDJ-2000, a fancy (and overpriced) CD player that many speculated would sound the final death knell for turntables in club installations. Twice that year rumors surfaced on the Internet, finally confirmed in October, that Panasonic would cease production of the Technics series of turntables, including the iconic SL 1200 line that had become so emblematic of DJ culture. Panasonic made the announcement official at the 2010 DMC World DJ Championships, and the DMC, for its part, announced that this would be the last year its competition would be strictly vinyl-based: for the first time, this bedrock of analog culture was opening its doors to users of Digital Vinyl Systems (DVS) like Serato Scratch Live and Traktor Scratch Pro (Samoglou 2011; Tokyo Reporter 2010). And "controllerism" emerged into the mainstream as music conferences and trade shows that year showcased a dizzying array of new devices that allowed laptop performers to manipulate sounds with neither turntables nor CD players. Indeed, it was also in 2010 that one company announced that it would press vinyl records out of recently deceased customers' cremated remains (Solon 2010)—as if to confirm with chiastic cruelty that not only was vinyl now dead; death was now on vinyl. http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/96/138[9/25/2012 3:04:23 PM] Attias Pioneer CDJ-2000 Official Promo RIP Technics 1200 Turntable And yet, even as DJ culture began to grapple with the pace and meaning of technological change, the music industry was celebrating a huge spike in vinyl record sales (Green 2010). Schwarz's interview, in fact, took place only three days before Record Store Day, which saw significant increases in vinyl records purchases worldwide (Cardew 2010). But as DJs are well aware, this recent surge in vinyl enthusiasm was driven far more by hipsters and audiophiles than EDM audiences. Even turntablism subcultures within hip hop—only very recently hailed for remaining "resolutely analog in a digital age" (Katz 2010: 130)—have moved away from vinyl recordings, if not yet from the turntables on which they spin. DJ Hideo Sugano, recognized in the Los Angeles hip hop scene as "the hardest working DJ on the west coast", passed away from cancer on 24 April 2010. I knew Hideo from the Los Angeles branch of Scratch DJ Academy, where I had taken a number of classes and been part of an emerging community of hip hop DJs and turntablists since 2005. Scratch DJ Academy had for me epitomized the ideals of vinyl culture; aspiring DJs were taught how to handle records first and foremost before mixing skills were addressed. Instructors and students alike prided themselves on their ability to manipulate wax and their almost fanatical devotion to collecting it; nevertheless, one of the last times I saw Hideo playing, he, like most of my Scratch Academy colleagues, was using Serato's DVS technology, and he had even demonstrated controllerist techniques on a Vestax MIDI controller at a major trade show in 2009. http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/96/138[9/25/2012 3:04:23 PM] Attias DJ HIDEO with VCI-300 @ Vestax Booth NAMM2009 I informally polled several DJs about the issue at one of Hideo's memorial events and their responses were the same—they still carried a handful of records to gigs for backup, but when they played out they consistently turned to DVS rather than actual vinyl records. This was usually admitted in a tone of shame and loss, as if confessing a fraud, as well as a reaffirmation of their preference for wax. They used DVS for the convenience of not having to schlep around bags of records and the ability to access large libraries instantly (though some begrudgingly acknowledged the advantage of being able to more extensively manipulate sounds in the digital realm with loops and cue points and the like), but made clear that they preferred the sound, feel and physical virtuosity of the older format.[1] Such reactions were manifestations of a crisis in the relationship between technology and identity that had for some time been mediated by discourses of authenticity and virtuosity rooted in the vinyl format. In EDM culture outside of hip hop, a similar crisis had passed some years earlier with the wide acceptance of CD players designed for DJs. Hip hop DJs, on the other hand, emerged into the digital world somewhat surreptitiously—DVS technologies allowed them to spin music from digital collections without giving up the tactile dimensions of the performance interface—DVS DJs play digital music using vinyl records and turntables as their primary interface.[2] It is clear from the expressions of anxiety surrounding the shift (not to mention the vehement denunciations among the vocal minority who hadn't made the leap to digital technologies of any sort) that within perceptions of the format lay an as yet unexamined crisis of identity. Music technologies have always been cathected with discourses of authenticity and virtuosity. Of course, these discourses are intertwined: a "real" DJ is defined in part by his or her technical proficiency with the instrument. What is at issue, however, is the "instrument" itself: both the format of the musical recording and the interface through which that recording is manipulated. Sarah Thornton's studies of club cultures have shown that the dynamic of authenticity and technology is fluid rather than fixed; new musical technologies are first perceived as phony and threatening to the "truth" of musical virtuosity. They may be skeptically incorporated into musical subcultures in the beginning but they carry audible traces of inauthenticity in the sounds they produce, sounds that audiences find unnatural, even unsettling. "Once absorbed into culture", however, "they seem indigenous and organic". Underlying this movement is "the fact that technological developments make new concepts of authenticity possible" (1996: 29). New technologies, in other words, undergo a process of authentication that is tied to the emergence and consolidation of new subcultural communities. These communities—Kenney (1999), following Paul Valéry, calls them "circles of resonance"—legitimize new conditions and standards for what is considered musical expression and skill. Eventually, as the new technology is incorporated into larger circles of resonance, it no longer sounds artificial and unsettling at all. This sequence of events has accompanied developments in music technology at least since the invention of the phonograph (Kenney 1999). The only thing new about the current crisis is the speed of technological change. Vinyl DJs had been frowned upon by mainstream musical culture until the turntable could be authenticated as a performance instrument in the 1980s (Schloss 2004). These same DJs, threatened by digital technologies in the 1990s, looked down upon CD-DJs and decried their efforts as inauthentic and unoriginal. DVS technologies emerged in the early 21st century, with many DJs, both vinyl and digital, expressing disdain for this latest innovation. In just a few years, DVS has been authenticated in some communities, with some of its users now questioning the authenticity of a new generation of performers increasingly known as "controllerists". And even these new button-pushers were outraged seeing their own authenticities under attack when in April 2010, Rana June Sobhany, a "social media maven" with no DJ experience at all, suddenly went viral with a YouTube video declaring herself "the world's first iPad DJ", and proceeded to book gigs at major venues thanks to the backing of shrewd publicists in the technology industry. http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/96/138[9/25/2012 3:04:23 PM] Attias The iPad DJ The phenomenon of the iPad DJ in particular seemed to take the question of authenticity to its most absurd extreme. Here was a young woman with rudimentary DJ skills at best (but plenty of marketing savvy) generating a storm of press (and landing coveted gigs) for DJing with nothing but a couple of video screens.[3] Many DJs and controllerists alike felt her sudden popularity made a mockery of the skills a DJ was supposed to have.