It’s 3pm on a Saturday in January, the dead of summer in Australia. My young children are enjoying some afternoon downtime in the living room, lounging, playing with LEGO after a day out swimming at the local pools at Southbank in Brisbane. The TV is on, mostly to provide the standard requisite summer soundtrack for a suburban household with kids under 10. It’s Encanto again, for the forty-seventh time in a row this summer and still—after all this time—nobody wants to talk about Bruno. After cracking the windows to catch the brilliant breeze (the quintessence of the genius of the ‘Old Queenslander’ house design), I decide it’s a fine time to hang up some clothes. With any luck they’ll be totally dry by this time tomorrow. But Encanto (as good as it is) just isn’t going to cut it for this task. Instead, I reach into my Smurf blue Ikea Kallax and grab Wilco’s classic alt country album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (cue dramatic music, dun dun dunnnnnnn) … on vinyl.
‘Oh, on vinyl’ you say, ‘classic pretentious aging indie rock hipster, this one.’ Friends, while aging I may be, hipster I most certainly am not. I have neither the necessary amount of hair nor the deeply ingrained self-righteous love for free-range organic hummus required to be a hipster. I loathe skinny jeans, have never listened to Sufjan Stevens, and frequently wear a baseball hat with Disney characters on it as an actual honest to goodness choice of apparel and not as an attempt at a trendsetting tongue-in-cheek fashion statement.
My love for vinyl comes from a genuine desire to be fully present when I listen to music.
While I have certainly met my share of trendier-than-thou vinyl enthusiasts, my love for vinyl comes from a genuine desire to be fully present when I listen to music; to be the sort of invested and persistent listener that I need to be to develop new levels of sonic appreciation and sensory stimulation. That means actively listening to artist-arranged albums instead of the background music of listener-produced playlists.
It’s not just the experience of vinyl that makes it a special way to listen to music; it is the medium itself. As tech pioneer guru Marshall McLuhan famously noted, ‘the medium is the message.’—the medium, or instrument, by which we receive the content is itself a part of its overall effect. In other words, the mode of content-delivery is never neutral—it too is formative. For me (and many others), while Spotify is ideal on road trips, we’d rather take a trip down memory lane when it comes to recreational listening at home. And for that, all roads lead to vinyl.
While the sale of vinyl records only currently accounts for less than 2% of global music sales, the world is in the midst of a full-on vinyl resurgence. In Canada, for example, while digital music sales were down 26.9% in 2020 on account of the preference for digital streaming services, vinyl sales were up by an astounding 21.7%. In the United States, the Los Angeles Times reports that vinyl sales exceeded one million copies per week in the final seven weeks of 2021, constituting the ‘longest continuous streak since accurate tracking began in 1991.’
Authentically Embodied
‘Interesting’ you might say, ‘but what does any of this have to do with the gospel and the life of faith?’ As we observe and exegete the present cultural moment, we should pay attention as much to the medium as we do to the message. Lots has been written about spirituality in a digital age; far less, about the emerging spirituality of a new self-imposed analogue age—a spiritual-unplugging— observable, for example, in the recent uptake of confessionalism, prayer books, liturgy, and a renewed focus on the spiritual disciplines by evangelicals.
Lots has been written about spirituality in a digital age; far less, about the emerging spirituality of a new self-imposed analogue age.
The resurgence of vinyl as a preferred audio medium points to a deeper desire and need in the culture that applies as much to Christian spirituality and formation as it does to music. Of the many ways that Christian faith is like vinyl, the preference for embodied imperfect authenticity instead of disembodied flawless efficiency is, perhaps, the most profound aspect that both share.
For the vinyl enthusiast and for the person with faith like vinyl, the imperfect authenticity of embodiment is part of the appeal. While streaming platforms sound fantastic and provide unparalleled freedom, they can leave the listener feeling somewhat gnostically-detached. Each track is like a sonic ghost, channelled for a short time through a Bluetooth speaker, before floating back to the endless sea of Spotify’s Sheol.
There is something about vinyl, though, that requires our active engagement, and it makes the act of listening special. In my experience, even when a record develops permanent damage, I find myself oddly more inclined to accept the deficiency than to reject it. I come to come to expect it; to anticipate and to incorporate the record’s weaknesses into my listening experience; to grow, not only familiar, but even fond of the scratches.
Faith Like Vinyl
Faith like vinyl finds its resilience in the authenticity of an embodied long obedience that eschews the inhuman flawless efficiency of a Spotify spirituality. It does not achieve spiritual progress by forsaking embodiment. Rather, faith like vinyl presses forward by means of its brokenness. It anchors its hope in an inheritance whose promise and power rests in the already-achieved perfection of another, Jesus Christ—the one whose body, though broken for us, was not forgotten by God the Father (not forsaken, not abandoned, not replaced) but redeemed.
We accept the flaws because they ultimately point beyond themselves to the death of death in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The brokenness of vinyl resonates with our own brokenness. Its fragile physicality functions like an outward visible sign of an inward audible grace. A grace that reminds us (in an almost sacramental sense) that authentic Gospel hope longs not for a disembodied Hi-Fi Hades but for the perfection of embodiment in the New Creation. We accept the flaws, not because we want to permanently abide in brokenness nor because we celebrate the futility of sin, death, and decay. We accept the flaws because they ultimately point beyond themselves to the death of death in the resurrection of the ‘firstborn from among the dead,’ Jesus Christ (Col. 3:18). As would-be vinyl enthusiast born ahead of his time, Gregory of Nazianzus, once said ‘whatever has not been assumed has not been healed.’
A few years ago, I inherited an original copy of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The original owner had, probably as a teenager in the 1970s, stuck a label with her name on it on the top right-hand corner of the cover: ‘Judy’. The record played fine, mostly. There was only one permanent skip at the tail end of the song ‘Fixing a Hole.’ In recent years, when the Beatles remastered and re-released their albums on vinyl, I had no desire to replace my ‘broken’ Sgt. Peppers album. The inherited copy was imperfect, but it had a story. It came with a history. You could see that history. You could hear it.
That history made me want to care for the record, rather than abandon it or replace it. It made me want to participate in its history and to learn to faithfully abide within the confines of its now unavoidable quirks, rather than to seek the false comfort of a cleaner more predictable, perpetually ‘perfect’ version.
