Featured Essay: In Defense of my Shitty Records

by Lorenzo Landini

I never thought I’d be a “vinyl guy.” For most of my life, every cent that I earned at some deadbeat job or other that didn’t go straight to rent and such things was put straight toward my own art making. A record player and the requisite vinyl to play on it was an expense I never dreamed of budgeting for. Sure, my earliest memories of rock and roll were my Dad giving some Dire Straits or Deep Purple a spin, and sure, when I visited friends with a record player I’d always ask to listen to something, but it felt an impossible - or at least impractical - luxury for me, a struggling artist always postponing the present for future success. 

For me and I’m sure some readers in my generation, the digital revolution was a godsend for music listening. I grew up stranded in conservative “rural sprawl” suburbia, broke as hell and without a car, so finding decent new music before Spotify and the like was a true test of patience. I would cling to any precious resources. I maintained relationships with total assholes at my school if they had Limewire access and promised to burn me a copy of that first Arctic Monkeys album. I’m still friends to this day with a summer camp acquaintance from Bakersfield who would mail bootleg CDs of Modest Mouse albums with elaborate Sharpie artwork adorning the face of the otherwise plain plastic. 

My music access got a little better when I finally got an iPod, but digital music still cost money for me, someone who had strictly limited “computer time” on the shared family work computer. Most music purchases were usually in album form (those iTunes bundles!!). Every song I got my hands on was treasured, dissected, digested, then treasured some more. 

Fast forward to now, in the last gasp of my “early” 30’s, still pursuing my dreams as a songwriter and performer, and for the most part music is so cheap and ubiquitous to almost feel… worthless? Where once maybe I’d go to a bar only because It Played Good Music, curated playlists paper over our lives in any public space with an omnipresent lethargy reminiscent of white noise. If we like, we can now live our lives with hyper-individualized but somehow still anonymous soundtracks, transforming our every waking moment into scenes from movies that say nothing to no one, but continue to shoot day after goddamn day. 

— 

My wife and I moved into our first ever house in the fall, a townhouse in her hometown of Philadelphia, after years of cohabitation in New York City apartments. With a little (or a lot) more space, the record player she purchased gets a seat of prominence in our living room, sitting atop a live wood table that my grandfather made for me as a desk decades ago, before the dementia, with a couple shelves full of records below it. 

Would I describe our “collection” as curated? In order?? Or uhhhhh any good like at all??? No, basically not, on all counts. For every Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live 1975-85 (from my Dad) or Let It Be (from my now father-in-law), there are several LPs by acts I would never seek out. The vast majority of our vinyl has ended up on our shelf as afterthoughts from family or as optimistic gifts from more cultured friends. 

But I treasure each of these recordings all the same, as I did the CD collection that accompanied me through the wasteland of Western suburbia, a scarcity mindset triggered into generosity and attention. A strange thing happens when I drop the needle: I pay attention in a different way than when I open up my streaming app of choice. Suddenly I am free from limitless choice, to say nothing of algorithmic curation; this is no longer an experience to be “optimized.” Instead, the curation of songs that unfold as a record plays - or, even more importantly, the tones and textures that bloom, the tempos and trebles that remind me that music is only vibration, is only sound, which miraculously can resolve into something profound - this sonic experience has been arranged by the skilled, passionate, and intelligent art lovers that worked on the recordings in the first place. 

My favorite example of the rare but illuminating magic that comes from playing records far outside of my “usual” listening is listening to my father’s old copy of Simply Red’s 1989 classic LP A New Flame. I rarely gravitate to pop soul as is, and that particularly reverb and synth drenched era does not scream “listen to me closely” … But somehow, if I drop the needle, I do! 

Some of my emotional attachment to hearing this record comes from listening with my father - on CD, or through an iPod, and maybe, sometimes more recently, streaming - in the car or setting the table for a family dinner. A New Flame came out a couple years before I was born, when he and my late mother were blissful newlyweds. But even granting nostalgia its place, when I put this record on in our house, I feel invited to listen and enjoy it in a totally different way than when I click a button. I listen in a way that requires patience, indulgence, and yes, criticism, the  kind of criticism that is an act of love, because it requires a careful ear and a deep love for the form. 

To wit: in my opinion, most of the songs on A New Flame are … Not Good! Most of this multi-platinum record is about boning (which also makes me think of that AI joke going around, “since computers can’t be horny they can’t make great art” … but I digress). Most of the hooks are irritatingly repetitive. And did I mention the synths? And the 80’s drums that sound like they are being played individually in empty cathedrals? 

But all the same, once I get the thing spinning, we start enjoying Mick Hucknall’s crooning tenor (nearly an alto?), and well, there’s no skip button. I find it almost feels sacrilegious to interrupt a record in an attempt to reach a certain song. Instead we make jokes about a song, perhaps, talking with who I’m listening with, actually engaging with the art regardless of my aesthetic snobbery, and dialoguing about it with those I’m in community with.

More than anything, I end up finding things that I do like about a given song when I’m listening on vinyl. What the session bassist found in a bridge section, a lovely backing vocal line, or a small hiccup in tempo that maybe would have been wiped away in a keyboard shortcut millisecond in an era where we no longer worry about wasted tape. 

I fear I may be coming off as a grumbler and a Luddite here, which is not my intention at all. I only mean to celebrate living in this sphere of music as an “enthusiast,” as opposed to a connoisseur. Our streaming reality is a miracle for music lovers, and I don’t want to return to a plastic past. But I do think, to appreciate the things we have, it helps to sweat a little bit for them. Music is no different. I hope in the decades to come, I will maintain my fondness for my shitty records, even as I buy more good ones. 

Lorenzo Landini performs his unique folk rock anthems under the tongue-in-cheek moniker “the amazing Lorenzo Landini.” Penning fully heartfelt but mildly ironic guitar songs, his classic arrangements lyrically bend towards the literary - or at least the verbose - spanning subjects from Charles Dickens to baseball statistics, decolonization to depression, death to, well, death. A Shakespearean stage actor, his songwriting continues his obsession with words in motion. He resides in Philadelphia with his wife and cat. 

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