#rainbow mirror

I feel that there’s a terrible sickness and disease that happens to people throughout their music careers, when they get too involved in the record or too involved in their own band. They sort of stop listening and become very self-absorbed and self-centred in the way they’re absorbing music and I think it’s a terrible mistake to stop listening and stop participating.  As I travel I always go to record shops. I love record stores and I don’t necessarily mean these cult special novelty stores. My favourite record store ever was the virgin Megastore in Union Square. Before it closed down it was incredible to walk into a ocean of CDs and to be able to get really any genre of music, that’s much more interesting to me than this sort of obsession with formats that we're involved in now. The irony of this kind of persistence on vinyl culture, I actually see it as very materialistic although it's coming from this subject of people who supposedly are fighting against, you know, corporations and this kind of large business model about consumer-driven motivations. But when I had a store in the East Village many times someone would come in and ask ‘do you have  this record?’ I say ‘sure’ and hand them the CD and they say ‘oh no, I only buy vinyl’ and I say ‘well that’s your loss then, you’re missing out on this whole enormous spectrum of ideas.’ Personally I think CDs are the best format in the sense that they are so worthless as physical objects. You really just have to be confronted with the subject matter and the music itself. There’s no kind of material value. Also I think jewel cases are so cool because they’re sculptural in a way they’re boxes versus pictures. Records are sort of flat in a reductive way. Oh yeah, that was the best. That era is one I greatly miss. Being limited in terms of the information that was available and having to do your own detective work, look at the shirts of who the band was wearing or who were in the thank you credits and then hunting that down through magazines or discussion, it was more engaging, active and participatory as a experience.