As the music industry rushes toward its digital destiny, and the profits that may lie there–someday executives believe, we’ll all download recording from our homes–a number of musicians and fan are starting to push back. Some are rave kids like Deupree, Saturday-night futurists romancing th near past. But some are top stars, concerned the technology has made the music too sterile. Twelve years after the CD promised “perfect sound forever,” the producers of Mariah Carey’s latest album, “Music Box,” deliberately fed static crackle and surface noise into the mix, just to mess things up a little. So much for the allure of perfect sound. Technology has long been an engine of change in pop music–think of the impact of the electric guitar, FM radio, video, and so on. Now some musicians are ready to jump in front of its wheels. As Neil Young wrote in a music magazine essay entitled “Digital Is a Huge Rip-Off,” “It’s an insult to the brain and heart and feelings to have to listen to [CD sound] and think it’s music.”
Low tech is having its revenge. MTV, which built an empire by having fun with electronic artifice, now has an influential hit with its mostly acoustic series, “MTV Unplugged.” The folk singer Beck did MTV one better: he recorded his hit album, “Mellow Gold,” largely in his kitchen; at the end of one song, you can hear him banging away on pots and pans. It may sound crummy in parts, but at least it sounds virtuous. A good guitar and amp-an old one, with vacuum tubes instead of transistors–now offers both purity of sound and absolution of soul. “I have to go to great lengths, really, to go around [digital] gear,” says Tom Petty, who, like a lot of musicians, seeks out vintage instruments. “I don’t have anything morally against all that. It just doesn’t apply to this music.” Because some of us need a little extra absolution, acoustic-guitar sales have nearly doubled since 1988. And most improbably, vinyl albums are making a comeback. New releases by acts like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Sonic Youth came out on vinyl before CD, and record sales last year jumped 68 percent–the first increase in 13 years.
In part, this backlash is a matter of simple sonics. Vinyl albums and tube amps really do sound richer and warmer than their successors. But it is also a revenge of absolutism. For most of the last decade, pop music took delight in its plasticity, and the technology of the era played along: synthesizers could change your sound, video could change your identity, and any ambiguities of race or gender were strictly up to the performer. Low tech arrives as an attempt to strip away artifice. It strives to separate identity from technology, to remind us of who we are.
But of course, technology never really loses these battles. And vinyl albums, for all their new cachet, still account for less than I percent of all sales. So amid the great expectations, here is a modest proposal: perhaps in the future, someone will invent a CD that sounds as musical as an old vinyl album. Or a newfangled amplifier that sounds as good as those bumming old boxes with the tubes in them. Or even a digital drum machine that can match the ersatz kick of those things Deupree and his friends swap on the Internet. That is the least we can ask of progress: that it be as good as what came before.
PHOTO: Just say no: Musicians like Deupree (left) of Prototype 909 reject the new technology, spurring a market for outdated gear. “The older equipment is just much more fun.'
