Tough Vinyl: Packing In Our Record Collections

This paper seeks to illuminate a series of contradictions between the way we talk about, write about, and interact with vinyl records on the one hand, and the material and social relations required for the use, production, and disposal of vinyl records on the other. I examine vinyl as both an ethical commodity (the sonic equivalent to slow food) and as "the poison plastic"; vinyl as both a medium for "subaltern" voices and as a toxic substance that causes cancer in the bodies of working class communities of colour; and vinyl as it both preserves the dead and destroys the living. These contradictions and many more, all part of what I call the vinyl-network, are exposed throughout this paper in a process of de-fetishizing vinyl. The central argument of this paper is that the nostalgia for petrocapitalism's 20th century bounty (of which records are an iconic piece), is a dangerous fetish that perpetuates destructive social and material relations. Ultimately, I contend we need to abandon the vinyl revival and mourn the vinyl record, lest the way we listen to recorded music perpetuate the destructive economic system that is petrocapitalism, enabling it to spin on and on like a broken record. If we cannot move beyond this economic system, the dead will continue to pile up; we will repeat the same tragedies, different not in cause but in effect, as temperature and sea levels rise, as the Anthropocene Extinction Event wipes out one quarter of all mammals on earth, and as the screams of the dying are drowned out by the bourgeoisie's hi-fi. This paper concludes with the suggestion that we take the broken record that is petrocapitalism, smash it into a million pieces, and feed it to a hungry colony of soil fungi.