Has Your Vinyl Fetish Changed the Way You Value Music?

Earlier this week we talked about the idea of the DJ transmuting into a kind of paternalistic cultural figure, and the way that young people today have found themselves frantically pursuing new forms of cultural capital. Today we are going to look at records.

In a crumbling control society, where we regulate ourselves through desire, excess and debt, the promise of economic security is a distant dream. Being told what to do and how to believe rouses us from our catatonic state of cultural exhaustion, and the DJ as an arbiter and tastemaker becomes the self-appointed father-as-leader, a kind of financial advisor for accruing cultural capital.

In this new cultural landscape, vinyl performs a number of functions. It legitimates this emerging cultural capital, just as the cash currency legitimates money. When money and economic capital have become a kind of magic created from thin air by a twisted banking system intent on enslaving a population through debt, the record romanticises a time when value was rooted to the physical world. In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher argues that the finite material world of the Real is a place which capitalism and its death-drive for infinite expansion tries hardest to deny; the polluted, broken Real world that eco-activism works hardest to enlighten us to. The vinyl record offers a kind of wonky compromise; the Real at a price. And you thought they were just records!

It's a wonky narrative that works particularly well during an era in which we're constantly encouraged to peel off our human rights one by one like unfashionable garments. Leftover is the naked consumer, contactless card in hand. Through bizarre corporate holidays like Record Store Day, as obedient little Thatcher-spawn we can fulfil the fantasy that we are able to change the world for good with our purchasing power alone. When I go home to my parents' house we all sit there dispassionately whilst horrendous news images become a spectacle flickering on the TV. But trust me, you don't want to be on the other side of the Argos counter if you sold my dad a substandard netbook 18 months ago. Does he have the receipt?! You better believe he's got the receipt.

It wasn't a lifetime ago when infinitely free and reproducible mp3s threatened to topple the shopping-cart. Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, torrents: they arrived with the tantalising, anarchistic prospect that, for better or for worse, we could dissolve the marketplace and just start sharing stuff for free. Despite the fact that the market's involvement in finance and public services has produced undesirable, brutally commodified, and disastrously unequal results, we became complacent to the government's authoritarian restrictions on file-sharing and decided to make an exception. But do we still really believe that we can work around the inherent structural inequalities of the marketplace, that capital can save us as long as the right people get paid in the right way?

Though many young people have grown depressed/jaded/disinterested in manic consumer object fetishism, the ever-morphing marketplace has been sure to take note. Through buying 'experiences'—be it interactive theatre, capital-V Vinyl, takeaways or toothpaste—we're encouraged to believe we're not taking part in a manipulative profit-fallacy, but actually experiencing the physical Real, the Real that capitalism survives by constantly deferring from us. In club culture, records are the epitome of this experiential marketing.

Bolstered by the vinyl revival, sites like Discogs have stepped up, as both a complex archive of cultural capital and a stockmarket for economic capital. From working in the second-hand book industry, I've seen how sites like this essentially become price touchstones for business owners looking to compete. Whereas a more cottage-y industry of smaller shops might breed varying prices and interests—you could have picked up a cheap post-punk record that slipped through the net at a shop that specialises in dance music, for example—the centralised marketplace's plurality means that every shop has to be a consummate dealer of everything in order to stay afloat. This leads to cartels, price fixing and cutthroat competition.

Just like online auctions, on-demand taxi companies, and residential holiday lettings; rather than interrogate why consumerism is destroying us all, whether workers are being paid fairly, or why landlords have historically exploited the population, we're invited to just get in on the action and have a go ourselves, to be our own boss. This is what capital does to culture—it makes the 80 quid LP of Gas' POP worth the same amount whether you've just stuck it on in a living room packed with your best friends on a come-down, or whether it accidentally comes on in the chapel of your great-uncle's funeral instead of "My Way."

Record labels and producers have reacted with market-subversive free releases, limited runs, white labels printed with rubber stamps and little or no information, and collectible 10-inch EPs. They hark to a kind of limited finite value, to a 'Real' mineral rarity. Go to a listening bar and have a craft ale with some affluent middle-aged architects who still skateboard and wear 200 quid raincoats to hear these special releases on systems that you could pawn for a house deposit. Your favourite track, the one that makes your hair stand on end and transports you to being seventeen years old at a bus stop somewhere—does it sound better here played on wax, than it did when you first downloaded the 128kbps mp3 rip from Kazaa eleven years ago? In the eyes of capital, they are the same. Every track has its price.

Neoliberalism, capital and postmodern plurality—through their manic systems of equivalence they have dissolved belief and left in its place aesthetic value judgments. As Fisher puts it, they've transformed our experiences of culture from "engagement to spectatorship." The idea that we could have beliefs and experiences with music that could transcend and undermine market-value is abhorrent to capitalism. Real experience and belief belong to a superstitious, ideological dark-age that capitalism constantly steps in to 'protect' us from. How can we enjoy a free mp3 when it is such low quality, when it isn't a physical object we bought, when it isn't mixed correctly, when we don't regard it with the cool, ironic and detached sense of spectatorship that the cult of DJ encourages? In our late-capitalist society we must re-read judgements of aesthetics and taste through the divisive distinctions that they conceal, the power structures they veil. In a time of heightened economic turmoil and grim prospects for the future of young people, it's little wonder that the DJ figure is basking in celebrity. Like the explosion of on-demand businesses, crowdfunding and startups, we are not encouraged to take a critical or revolutionary stance on the marketplace, DJs and club culture. Instead we only recognise a chance to gain some of this emerging cultural capital for ourselves. Rather than destroy the banks, we've spotted a chance to mint our own money. We mustn't forget that—like credit—this emerging cultural capital is only worth as much as our belief in it.

Now, can anyone lend me a few quid for that latest Beatrice Dillon 12" on Boomkat?