“Vinyl Me? No Thanks”

Wow, nothing honors an emcee who used to rap about “washing dishes in the ditch” and who “got lost downtown couldn’t find a ride home” like a yuppie $23 vinyl record. And that’s the “special” price, mind you… deliberately more expensive maybe, to make records even more of a status symbol?
Hey vinyl geeks, I would transform all my CDs into records, except that I’d need a warehouse to do that. You can’t order vinyls in the mail, without involving UPS. You can’t take them in the car with you. You also can’t skip tracks on them. This leaves one plausible explanation of this recent vinyl phase: music is no longer appealing for its own sake, to many people, a sort of symbolic oneupmanship is necessary to send the experience of sharing aural expression into territory of appeal.
I mean as far as I know, vinyl is not in any compatible with the internet: CDs are infinitely more so, since they fit into computers. Odelay is produced by The Dust Brothers, the same crew that did Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique… who the hell is listening to Paul’s Boutique on vinyl? The whole point is that it’s stupid, crazy and over the top. It’s sure as hell not freakin’ Neil Young – Harvest, or something. I mean listen when that funky beat comes in “High 5 (Rock the Catskills).” Its very appeal lies in its grating unpalatability, an ironic catharsis like a white boy hip-hop heavy metal. Yet this bizarre facebook group Vinyl Me, Please is featuring Odelay, offering you this $23 ripoff double album or whatever and they’re saying “Beck truly became Beck” on Odelay. Well, for $23 you could more than fund the purchase of Odelay and also its predecessor Mellow Gold, an album which unlike Odelay features guitar rock in any capacity, and which also disproves that laughable claim of Mellow Gold’s irrelevance. “Mutherfu**er” and “Black Hole” are some of the finest in the whole Beck catalogue. Meanwhile, if you bought this gyp joint $23 Odelay, listen extra hard to that Dadaist choir on “The New Pollution” droiding out that six-note jingle. They’re especially making fun of you.

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