I reposted a quote from Jack White today on my tumblr - you can read it here - it's about having a soul and why some things should matter. I've read it maybe a dozen times now and aside from making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I've been sitting here this evening thinking about just how right he is. It's one thing to think about how right somebody is but it's another thing entirely to do something about it. Lots of people love music but it become no more than a soundtrack to life rather than the movie itself. So I've decided to put some money to one side this month. Not much, just a couple of ten pound notes. Next time there's a record fair in town, I'm going to give my kids £10 each and take them with me. The rules will be simple:
1. No rush. Chill. Look at some sleeves. See what section the things you might like are in. Ask the dude behind the desk about it but you must find something that you want to take home and listen to.
2. When we get home, you get to drive. You get to learn how to drop the stylus on and what speed things play at. Not quite sure how this will go down - I ma probably more interested than they are...
3. We listen to whatever it is together and talk about it. Why we chose what we did, why it was good, why it was bad. Sometimes, it's OK that the sleeve looked better than the music actually was. That's life in a nutshell.
Maybe we'll even turn our phones off while we do this. The plan might need thinking out a little more but I think it has mileage.
A few years ago, I turned into the amazing digital man... I was full on with the programme. All the way. I've got a hard drive here with over 100gb of music on it. That's a lot of songs. It's my entire CD collection ripped, stashed and sorted - this includes rather a long time when I was publishing Burn and editing Zero - sometimes 20 to 30 CDs a day could turn up. It's about ten years worth. Pardon my language but I've always fucking detested compact discs. That was the first step on the slippery slope as far as I'm concerned.
Anyway, when the collection got too big for my actual laptop, I made the hard drive into a jukebox and pointed my iTunes memory at it. Very nice. Hit play and let it roll - and as the months turned into years, I realised what an unholy mistake I had made.
Which is when I rediscovered how much I loved vinyl and had only moved away from it because the industry made me.
That's not music. That's data.
I hardly know any of the album artworks from this collection - and I certainly don't know most of the producers. Perhaps most importantly for me, I don't know any of the songwriters and that can't be right.
This ethos is also present in my book collection. There was a time that I thought it would be a great idea to simply exist as 'me' in the world with everything digitised. I still like the idea of that but as fast as I was upgrading/downgrading (delete as you see fit) my book collection digitally, the new books I was buying were made of paper.
I've been writing a lot recently and if ever I need to reference something, I'm certainly not reaching for my iPad to flip through books. I go straight to my shelves, pull things out, it's a bit of an adventure to be honest. (You can't throw that bullshit around about how you can make notes in ebooks either - that's just a pretentious lie).
Movies, I don't much care about. I have a couple of complete box sets (Life on Mars and Starsky & Hutch) but if they weren't around, no big deal. I could always find them again - probably. I don't define my existence by movies and television, but I do define it by books and music.
But - I am also enthralled with the idea of owning a minimum amount of 'stuff' and being a free spirit in the world. Maybe I should just let my heart do the talking and free my brain up for nothing more than getting work done.