Featured Essay: On Variants and Why I Have Three Copies of the Same Album

by Margaret Muiruri

Nirvana’s Nevermind has three versions I own. Practically speaking, it is absurd to have numerous copies that are not useful. However, there is very little logic to collecting vinyl. The copies represent different periods in my life, reflecting various versions of myself when I acquired them.

The first copy was borrowed in a secondhand store at the back of an old movie house in Nairobi. I recall that it was dusty and cardboard-like with that smell that lingers on. This vinyl was smoothed, scratched, and hardly great, but when I dropped the needle and the entire song of Smells Like Teen Spirit blasted through the fuzz, it became living. It was not a record that only played music, but it was a breathing history. The teenage rebellion, which survived, was symbolized by the scars that made it popular. I had to listen to it over and over again on payday, Sunday and Monday, and I felt as though I was addressing the spirit of a past age.

Several years later I purchased the second edition, the clean reissue bound in cellophane. It was beautiful with its undisturbed quietness. I vowed never to open it, that it was a vow to keep something holy. It was just that I would look at it as a relic behind glass. It was no longer listening but keeping some moments intact. Collectors will realize that silent contentment with the possession of something ideal comes with the knowledge that you might have experienced it, but you prefer not to. It is an odd form of love, that one that appreciates silence rather than music.

The third copy was an indulgence. A 30th anniversary issue, fully remastered, with extra demos and a finished booklet of photographs I didn’t want but very much desired. I assured myself that it was because of the new material, yet the reality is more basic: I was out of the element of pursuing something. Waiting to see the delivery, peeling off the shrink wrap, hearing those well-known notes in a new, slightly different texture. The new one did not supersede the old ones but only added to them, another stratum of my continuous conversation with the same music.

It may sound absurd to have three versions of Nevermind. It has never been a matter of reason to collect records. It is all about feeling and pretending it is routine. It’s about following the echo of who we were when we first pressed play. Every copy is a variant of me, the dreamer, the protector, and the believer that something that you know can still surprise you.

Variants, alternate covers, colored pressings, and limited runs are discussed by collectors as sacred relics. Obsession may pass as outsiders, but to us it is storytelling. The beauty is in the flaws, the peculiarities, and the feeling that each pressing is some kind of fingerprint, unique and impossible to reproduce. You justify to yourself that you are in search of better sound quality, but the real reason is you are in search of connection.

On some occasions, as I flip through my records, I consider that every one of them is part of my history. The desiccated edges of album cover, the smoldering scribbles on the song lists, and the price tags of the long-gone outlets are all time capsules. The process of gathering becomes a way to preserve the time when we first discovered that music.

Vinyl boasts of queer intimacy. And physically it is in a forgetting world. You take away a record, peel off its sleeve, put it on the turntable and drop the needle, and you can see the opening of the sound. It is ritualistic, permissive and mortal.

 The hiss and the crackle indicate to you that imperfection is not necessarily ugly. Perhaps it is one of the reasons why I come back to Nevermind. It is not about the songs; they are imprinted in my memory, but about the ritual, the reminiscence of the fact that music is not only heard but also experienced.

The question that arises is why collective buyers will purchase an identical album multiple times when everything becomes immediate with streaming. Streaming is not the same as having a record in your hands and the little sense of discovery of finding a rare pressing in a dusty crate. It is unable to reproduce the beating of discovery. Vinyl is also not only possessive but also existential. It is all a growth in between what we were and what we are in every one of the records. Vinyl symbolizes not only ownership but also life. Each record is the evolution of what we were, what we are, and what we want to be. The continuity is there somehow, which is very reassuring. 

The music remains the same; we do not. The Nevermind record is not the same after each turn, but it is not that the record itself was changed; it is I who changed. It is not merely sound therein grooved buttales.

Yes, I have; I have three copies of the same album. One of them brings me back to the wonderful old days, one makes me secure in the present, and the other is waiting in the future.

The tales are all put together to provide us with the version of a life that is to have no final score.

And perhaps that is what gathering truly is, a silent piety, a means of holding on to our favorite songs through time, which continues to pass. We often find ourselves returning to the same things, but they no longer sound as they once did. They’re about what they mean.

 Margaret Muiruri is a Kenyan author whose work cogitates on the connection between recollection and music with individual history. Every song to her is a story, and hearing is no less revealing a thing than remembering. Her essays may have the themes of nostalgia, loss and silence in happy continuity. She is an obsessed vinyl record and story lover; this is why she writes about how music helps us to cling to the things that we have that make us the way we are. Margaret is living in Nairobi, where she goes on gathering records and memories.