Featured Essay: A Zine About a Website About Records

by Jason Bombach

The world, it seems, is an awful place. Shit is just falling apart. If the despair machine in my pocket right now is to be believed, the world will be ending any day now, so I might as well buy that new car or acne cream or novelty socks or knockoff ED medication that’s been slotted in between thirst traps and footage of a live genocide. Nothing matters so buy, buy, buy! The internet has turned into a spiral of two or three social media sites full of AI slop created by schizophrenia causing bots meant to scare and enrage you. What was once a place I went to connect to the wide world has become a shadow that haunts me and tries to make me afraid of the world instead. 

I Have That on Vinyl is a website in the original sense of the word. It doesn’t have an algorithm, you don’t have to have an account, it’s not selling your data to Palantir or whatever, just records and stories about records. IHTOV is old school internet. A loose collection of weirdos (positive) who love a thing talking about that thing. It is chock full of two things missing from many peoples lives these days, joy and passion.

One of the worst trends to linger over from the 90’s is the idea that caring is uncool. Don’t you know nothing matters? Why do you care so much? Like, whatever man. Over the intervening decades, like everything else, this attitude has been supercharged by the internet. To the point that now, to have interest at all it seems, is cringe. Oh you like something? Gross. It’s getting to be that a guy can’t have a passing interest in trains without being diagnosed. But where has that attitude got us? While we (and I am including myself in this, for I was also a miserable twenty-something once) were being too cool to care, fascist freaks hijacked the planet. Now every victory they have sends us careening deeper into nihilism, leading them to capture more ground. It’s all a feedback loop. 

I say, fuck that. It’s cool to give a shit! The world is changed by a relatively small number of people with passion. Whether that’s a passion for geopolitical revolution or for records, it all contributes to a culture where caring is cool. It may not change the world today but at the very least it’ll make dating profiles more interesting. I want to live in a world of almost anti-gatekeepers. A culture of people who want to show you their favorite band or movie. A little bit of cynicism can go a long way (I am a curmudgeon with an acute bullshit detector after all) but it can’t be allowed as an excuse to do nothing.

IHOV is full of people who are full of passion. That’s one of its biggest draws for me. That is how your world can widen and your own passions become deeper. It offers something an algorithm can’t, which is stuff that is nothing like the stuff you like already. For example, Michele hates (or at least can’t get into) IDLES or Sonic Youth, two bands I love, and I have a disdain for nu-metal, which Michele likes. But when she writes about Fred Durst I still read it because of the passion she brings to it and how she relates it to her life. As a result, my understanding of the world becomes a little more complete. A gap is bridged. I step outside of my niche and get a new angle on things. Let’s see your algorithm do that.

A website like IHTOV is created by passion but it is sustained because it creates joy, a rare thing in these, the waning days of empire. Joy has no promise of profits. No guaranteed productivity to measure. So the systems we suffer under hate it and seek its complete eradication. Every second you’re joyful is a second you’re not making some billionaire more money. These ghouls trade only in misery. So any ounce of joy you can squeeze out of this existence is a victorious act of resistance. Every time you enjoy your life, you are refusing to be ground down to fuel for the money machine. And you deserve that joy! IHTOV is full of people who find joy in art and music and the flat disc that holds all that joy in its grooves. It’s a website dedicated to spreading the things that we love because that’s what you’re supposed to do with joy. The more the merrier as the saying goes. 

The internet tries to convince you that it is an accurate representation of the world writ large. But then you go outside and touch grass, as I’m told the kids say, and you realize just how warped that lens is. No matter what is happening online, it only matters in relation to the real world. So bringing one of the few websites that isn’t full of misery and anger into the real world is a thrill. The physical object has a certain magic to it. It feels more substantial, more permanent, than any website ever could. It’s the same magic that attracts us to records. I can loan it to a friend, write notes in the margins, display it, or even cut it up and make something new out of it. Books and zines are especially wondrous to me because it’s like time traveling. As long as one of these zines is floating around somewhere, a reader can be transported back to us here and get our insight into Neil Young and Richard Simmons. How strange.

Maybe I’ve gotten a bit too philosophical (as is my nature) about what is essentially a small indie website dedicated to vinyl records. There are probably more impactful things to spend my time on. But we live in a hell world of our own creation. So anytime we decide to create something different, I’m for it. I’m honored to have contributed in a small way to a small island of empathy and love of music on the choppy internet seas. Even if it’s with just a few articles complaining about bad record packaging. I hope the future of the internet (if there is one) looks more like IHTOV and less like whatever it is now. Until that happens, death to the algorithm! And long live I Have That On Vinyl!