Vinyl in the 21st Century: Alex Richwine
A photo and interview series on college students with record collections.
Alex is a soon-to-be upperclassman, math major, and Music House resident at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. He is also a contributing member of Wesleyan’s music blog, which follows student bands and offers weekly track roundups. Here’s a look into his record collection from his dorm room.
The cool thing about record collecting and the vinyl industry right now is that there’s a dual nature of very new and very old albums being put out. My collection’s about half and half. You find new ones in these boujee record stores with very thick sleeves and posters in them with download codes. There are some perks to those new, slightly more expensive records.
When I’m record shopping, I’m looking for older albums in the dollar bin, or ones that are $5 but are a classic albums. Those ones where you’re like damn! that’s a good deal — even though all you’re getting is the music, and maybe not even at its 100% high quality original when it was released. But it’s still great music, and that’s why I get it.
I have this Al Green record, which I listen to a lot, it’s Let’s Stay Together. I bought it for maybe $3 at a local record store in Virginia. It’s got a bunch of incredible tracks on it. The quality of the record and the sleeve are not great, and there’s skips and stuff, but I didn’t know this album before I got it on vinyl. After I got it, even with all its imperfections, it became one of my favorite albums.
There’s this company Newbury Comics that sells records like this Marvin Gaye one — they do special pressings of classic albums. It’s on very, very colorful vinyl. It’s gimmicky but that’s what people like. It stands out in a record collection. It just feels like a bigger edition than a regular album.
My record collection makes me happy, not in the sense that I own things, but in the sense that I can look at these things and each one represents an album that means a lot to me. Just looking at them all stacked up next to each other — in a way that’s so much different than looking at your iTunes library. You can see all the greats, all the legends right up against each other. I’ve got John Coltrane next to Jimi Hendrix. Where else are you going to be able to see, physically manifested, these two names next to each other? You’ve got the Beatles, then Beach House, and then Beach Boys. Beach House is sandwiches between two of the greats.
There’s legends here and then there’s just people who I’ve found in record stores, like William Onyeabor, who’s this great African kind of disco-funk. He’s an unclassifiable talent, who I think David Byrne kind of discovered in the past decade or so. And he’s music’s been really big — this is a recent pressing of a compilation of all of his stuff. A really funny guy. Unfortunately I think he passed away a year or two ago. But that was after his music resurfaced in America and the western world, super cool and ahead of its time in its own way. This is something that an owner of a record store recommended to me and gave me that real quick history and I said, “I’ll buy it,” and it’s fantastic.
New Order is kind of the epitome of a cool band, a sound that… I don’t know, I don’t really want to make any conjectures. They’re like the good part of the 80s for a lot of people our age. We kind of scoff at a lot of 80s synth pop. They’re more in the alternative vain, and more in the interesting song structure kind of vain. This is a compilation of stuff they did from ’81-’82 on this swirled clear vinyl. This is an example where the two categories I mentioned before blend together. This is definitely an old album, early 80s way before I was born. Maybe these songs were sold for really cheap back when they came out, but now it’s merging with the new process of pressing it on gimmicky, clear vinyl with a nice sheen to it — it brings together two things that a record collector like me likes, which is old music (almost always better than new music) and newer technology and great pressing.
I think I have different reasons for listening to vinyl now than when I started my collection. I started my collection freshman year of high school, when I was really getting into all this music from all these different eras, and digital just wasn’t doing it for me. I had accumulated songs in my library or whatever, but that just didn’t feel good to me.
My mom would sometimes loan me CDs, and I really liked to listen to those in the car. But then I thought, hey, vinyl has really big cool artwork. So as a fifteen year old kid I started going into record stores and buying records, just because I liked how large they were. There was probably an element of feeling like it was cool to be engaged in this antiquated process of record collecting too. At the time, record collecting hadn’t hit its boom like it has the last couple of years.
Over time, I began to realize it’s not just about appreciating the artwork or how many goodies are in it, it’s more representing almost all of what I listen to. It’s nice whenever you want to listen to something, you can find it, touch it with your fingers, and put it on to play. I like viewing my record collection as a representation of my taste. In that sense, it’s a physical manifestation that I can show to people or I can look at when I’m feeling down, or that I can call upon whenever I want to. Obviously I don’t use them as substitutes for actual friends… but when I’m in a solitary kind of mood, these definitely are — I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a loser. They just have a lot of meaning to me in ways that no other form of music does. I have so many memories associated with putting an album on my turntable and vibing in my room or zoning out.
That’s very significant to me, and I’m sure it is to others as well. Collecting records moved past just being what it was at the start — just a cool thing to do. Now it actually has emotional significance to me to look at this collection. It’s gained a significance to me where I don’t even consider this a bunch of records I bought anymore. Now it’s my collection as a whole.
