Two Turntables And A Philosopher

There are several things a person can accomplish with a vintage turntable. They can sit in a puddle of nostalgia, from their own childhood, or from someone else’s. They can experience acoustic subtleties on a vinyl record that digital music glosses over. Maybe they’ll find pleasure in holding a physical artifact in their hands, in a more corporeal, interactive experience than they’d get from just tapping on a flashy pocket rectangle. These are all lovely and acceptable reasons to get and use a record player.

I have another to add to the list. In a roundabout way (see what I did there?), in making a turntable part of one’s listening routine, one can also get a sense of what it’s like to think philosophically.

Allow me to explain.

When a fan/audiophile decides to spin rather than tap to get their tunes, they make a decision about their relationship with music. They forfeit the ability to yell “nah” and flip forward, to be impatient and noncommittal. A turntable and the flea-market-find-records that go with it, aren’t for the fickle and impatient. A person has to get up out of their chair to change the song/album, being careful not to damage the needle or the surface of the record. They tend to listen to an entire side, possibly an entire record at once, even the tracks that are just kind of “meh”. They probably spend a fair bit of time poring over stacks of old LPs at antique markets and vintage stores, in search of more amazing stuff to stuff in their ears.

It sounds like a drag to our frantic, modern sensibilities (I confess, I still prefer shuffle on my phone), but there are definite trade-offs. I’m not an expert on brains or sound engineering, and I wouldn’t presume to explain exactly which itches get scratched in the process, but something special happens when you go analogue with music. There are details in songs that don’t come through unless we stop and listen patiently, unless we read through liner notes and muse over cover art. Choosing a record player over a digital player just makes things different, usually in a good way. There’s this phenomenon of sitting down into a song played through a record that just doesn’t seem to happen in fickle, digital format. It involves intentionality and a little extra bit of agency.

And yes, the experience is kind of like being a philosopher. Just like we 20th century humans tend to get our music in digital form, we also seem to prefer our information, our ideas, and our conversations in digital bites. We’re able to conveniently scroll past nuanced ideas and arguments just like we’re able to leapfrog to the next song. We can organize a feed of what pleases us, as opposed to what we need. Listen, no judgement, I do it too, both with my music and my daily dose of wisdom and knowledge. Some days, a mile-wide-inch-deep is all I’m capable of, and I’ve always believed that some thought is better than no thought at all.

But I’m also convinced that we do miss something when all we ever do is skip along the surface. When we rush our thinking the way we rush our music, completely overlooking the older, “analog” version of it, it’s not the same, and the things we miss can actually hurt us.

Philosophy demands that we sit still with an idea, pour over it, premise by premise. Philosophy urges us to take note of subtleties in the background that we might have otherwise missed, to ruminate on the tones and intention of the “singer”, to explore how a symphony of ideas is orchestrated and performed. It encourages us to listen to the same “album” repeatedly, gaining a little something more with each sitting. If we’re lucky, we get to listen and share with someone else, to watch them process and react. Again, a little more intentionality and agency.

I know a bunch of reasons why many people don’t listen to music in LP record format. It’s pricey to set up a system, to amass a collection of albums worthy of it. Turntables and records require tending, and care, or they get scratched and broken. Never mind how treacherous it is to lug all this around with you, how virtually impossible it is to have any sort of positive turntable-related experience on a city bus or at the dentist’s office.

Fortunately, philosophy is not saddled with any of these drawbacks. It’s about as free as anything is these days. It has not been broken beyond repair by anyone in the last few thousand years. There’s always a patch, a way back. It’s completely portable (although you may still piss people off with it on a bus or at the dentist’s office).

There are, however, shared deterrents between turntables and philosophy. People don’t think they have the time, don’t have it in them to sit and focus and listen and think anymore. It probably goes deeper than just inconvenience. I’m not sure where or when it happened, but we started labouring under the false notion that we don’t deserve richness, to be present and engaged and caught up in something as simple and wonderful as a song, or a thought. We allow ourselves room for a quick track or two on shuffle, or in the case of philosophy, a meme and a video short with a quick blast of ideas, most of which go right over our exhausted heads. We don’t think we’re worth it, even when “it” is as simple as a minute or two to ponder, to turn something over in our hands, polish it, and let it play through.

Someone in our household came into possession of a record player a few months ago, and although I will be the first to admit that I still get most of my music through my phone, in fits and starts, I have challenged myself to sit patiently through a few albums. Moreover, I’ve used this experience as a thought experiment, a philosophical refresher. Can I still immerse myself in an idea the way I do with a song played on a record? Can I be patient and curious with it? Can I appreciate it, even the parts I don’t particularly like? Can I imagine ways that I might add to it and share it? Can I keep myself from hitting “skip” and scrolling when I’m flustered and in a hurry?

I’m old enough to have listened to music on a record player when they weren’t vintage. I have very clear memories of pulling the cushions off our nubby orange couch and jumping on them as I made my way through “Saturday Night Fever”. I was really little at the time, and I wasn’t allowed to touch any part of our sound system, so I had no choice but to listen to at least one whole side. Consequently, I could probably still sing along to any track from it, a million years later. I know that record as well as I know pretty much anything.

I’m trying to hold onto that feeling, amidst all that’s happening around me as a much older thinker. Nostalgia aside, I’m worth the extra time and effort, and the ideas I play with for a living are worth it.