The Joys of Retro-Kitsch
The joy of retro-kitsch vinyl is something I’ve been wanting to write about for about a year. And I’d hoped that you loyal OYB readers could be right there in the Avant Garde of Cheese Music appreciation.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.
First, RE/Search books put out Incredibly Strange Music Vol. I. It had great interviews with people who collect bizarro vinyl. Cool! I said. I’m not the only loon out there listening to the U.S. Navy Steel Drum Band Plays “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Then I discovered that there was a huge cheesy music revival well under way! It started slowly. We spotted the zine 8-Track Mind, its pages artfully cut into the shape of an 8-track cassette. Ben Vaughn’s neo-retro album Mono U.S.A. came out.
Sub Pop’s hot new act was no Seattle grunge band, but the neo-lounge-music act “Combustible Edison.” A pioneering cassette zine called The Underground Culture Vulture emerged from the wilds of Ohio, to celebrate and propagate some of vinyl’s more amazing moments. RE/Search came out with Incredibly Strange Music, Vol. II.
Then one day, five feet of records from our library book sale’s “Easy Listening” bin suddenly disappeared!
Finally, God forbid, even Newsweek magazine gave neo-schmaltz music a two-page spread (Aug. 22, 1994). And when the kooky, hyper-stereophonic music of Juan Garcia Esquivel gets reissued on the CD Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music , National Public Radio goes into Esquivel frenzy: In one week they run two or three different segments toasting this Kennedy-era orchestral wingnut.
When All Things Considered starts using Esquivel as segue music between stories, you know it’s a phenomenon gone mainstream. So whatever can be going on here? Why do otherwise sober people snap, and start prancing around to 35-year-old cha-cha music?
Well, the arrival of the $17 Compact Disc galvanized audio retro-grouches of all stripes. One vocal camp says that the old recording techniques, where every sound made it’s way through a cascade of dozens of glowing vacuum tubes, actually sounded better than today’s dry CD sound. (I don’t quite buy that, but it’s true that those old producers sure knew how to give an amazing illusion of depth on those mono recordings.)
But another camp just said, Hey! there’s all these old records here that people are just giving away! Or even if they’re 50 cents, you could get 30 of these for the price of a new CD! Is CD sound quality really 30 times better than old vinyl? Will I get 30 times as much pleasure from new music compared to this Fabulous Sounds of the Pipe Organ and Percussion? Or this Harmonica Hi-jinx in High Fidelity?
And thus another innocent mind is corrupted…
