In my part-time alternate life as a consultant, I have often pondered why a person chooses to buy a Billabong sweatshirt as opposed to a Quiksilver one. The choice is not an obvious one. The products themselves are essentially the same. The name is the only real difference. The gradient between one and the other is an infinitesimal pattern of grey, yet the decision — and millions more exactly like it — happen everyday.

Jonah Lehrer has emerged over the past few years as neuroscience’s strongest and most interesting voice. His Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) is as smart and fun a mix of the Two Cultures as you’re likely to find. With his spot as Seed Magazine’s Editor at Large and a contributing editor gig at Wired, Lehrer is poised and positioned to inform the public about brain science like few others ever have been.

With How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), Lehrer turns his attention to the marketplace and how our brain power influences our buying power. Peter Merholz wrote that it was clear that Lehrer had “attended the Gladwell school of non-fiction writing, anchoring his facts in stories.” Maybe it was a compliment, but having recently read Gladwell’s latest book (the sometimes quite interesting but ultimately nearly pointless Outliers), I prefer Lehrer’s prose. It’s clear, concise, and lyrical, and at least I know there’s some science behind it.

The traditional wisdom says that we make important decisions by relying on the rationality of the logical brain to override the “animal stuff” (as Howard Bloom calls it) of our emotions and instinctual drives. In How We Decide, Lehrer contends that the process is a bit more nuanced than that. It’s a subtle dance, a process of bend and blend that depends on the situation. Well, it’s not quite that simple either, but Lehrer’s book often makes it all seem so. It ends with a “taxonomy of decision-making,” which helpfully applies many of the book’s anecdotal dilemmas to practical, real-world situations.

Coming to the brain and purchasing decisions from a different angle, Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Customer Behavior (Viking, 2009) argues that it’s all just so many peacock feathers. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, so his lens is longer than Lehrer’s, but doesn’t mean he sees the situation any clearer or in higher relief. Like Lehrer, he writes to be read, but where Lehrer;s prose is positive, Miller’s negativity seeps into his sentences. His wit is by turns playful and biting, veiling and betraying a deep-seated cynicism toward the consumer capitalism he’s analyzing.

Miller writes like he’s the first academic to discover the field of marketing, as if Stewart Ewen, Douglas Rushkoff, and Marshall McLuhan (!), among many, many others hadn’t already upturned similar soil. In addition, his arguments smack of psychoanalytic reasoning (i.e., many of our purchasing decisions are driven by the libido and thereby illustrate material sublimation, many others are driven by narcissism, etc.) dressed up in evolutionary garb: We buy stuff to advertise our potential to each other as possible mates, sexual and Platonic. It’s certainly not all bad or bland though. Miller’s idea of “fitness faking” (about which I’ve written before) makes a brief appearance, and his “Exercises for the Reader” (similar to Lehrer’s concluding taxonomy) are a nice touch of pragmatism more science books could use.

After having read both of these books, I don’t feel any closer to understanding the Billabong/Quiksilver dilemma, but as Miller writes on the very first page of Spent, echoing McLuhan, “consumerism is hard to describe when it’s the ocean and we’re the plankton.”

Spin The Black Circle

McLuhan and Vinyl? I know – I sometimes stretch an idea to its snapping point but isn’t that why I bother to type all day?

Here goes – As I sit on the panels I’m invited to I often forget to remind myself that at the heart of all my discussions about music and technology the root of it is about my enduring passion for music.

Computer technology, especially web 2.0, has fooled many of us into thinking that we now have a “new” way of communicating. That is simply not true; we forget that Marshall McLuhan pointed out decades ago new technologies simply create new environments – the old environment then becomes the content of the new environment; Facebook simply allows us to digitize our Rolodex. The computer and its keyboard are the medium in this particular message. Our constant need to remain in touch with friends and family endures, and still will well beyond technology.

We should really be considering technology’s effect on the individual and society. Remember, e.e. cummings warned that “progress is a comfortable disease.” So where does music with its myriad genres and forms, its emotions and passionate responses, its common currency, fit into a “technological” culture?

Well consider this – Music is the medium is the message; bear with me here.
If music is the message then in McLuhan’s terms the vinyl record can be described as a technological extension [the medium] of the musicians body. The medium then creates the environment that produces effects [the media.] This then has an effect on society and culture where the starting point is always the individual – that is, you and me. McLuhan also advised against a rigid separation of the physical from the psychological.

If we then consider that the physics of media have changed yet the media that provides the atmospheres has not, and we understand that the effect is still psychological and can not be separated, do McLuhan’s ideas help us unravel the mystery of what innately binds us to the rhythms and lilts of music around the globe? [My argument carries over into live performance too where the instruments are extensions of the players bodies.]

Vinyl racks at Music Millennium Portland

Anyway, on to my thoughts about vinyl.

In a world of 320kb MP3s, FLAC, loss-less this that and the other files, I’m going to take a leap of faith here and hope that many of you jump in too – my premise is that a vinyl record surely has to be the purest embodiment of our universal love for music. It’s the closest thing to experiencing music live that I have heard. When compared to A to B, with A being an analog record and B being a CD, A wins every time for me. I share Neil Young’s comments in the digital vs analog wars – Young has acknowledged the benefit of hiss-free recording that digital technology offers, with the caveat that “along with the hiss went depth of sound and the myriad possibilities of the high end where everything is like the cosmos, exploding stars, echo.” [Read more of this discussion here.]

Digitizing music has made music more affordable and provided ease of use in portability but at the huge expense of having the emotional range, the highs the lows the rumbles, removed in the process. What we have been hearing on CD is a compressed version of a digital slice of the possible range of sound available to our ears. At live shows the bass sub woofers in the PA system allow you to literally ‘feel’ the bottom end, on CD or MP3 that experience is simply not available to you. Yet, when you play a vinyl record through a great hi-fi system you can experience it in a recording.

For some reason I decided at about exactly noon last Saturday to drive over to Music Millennium on Portland’s east side to buy some vinyl. Any vinyl. I came home with three weighty albums – comfortable with their heft and size and glad that I couldn’t just peel them open and stick them in the car’s CD player. [That's rather like the audio equivalent of Slow Food, Slow Music.]

The universe works in mysterious ways. Why is it that when I spend my day riffing on ideas like the ones in this post, drawing them out like an endless piece of string only to have it end up in a tangle of knots, why, why do I find myself buying three vinyl albums for completely different reasons and upon getting home and spinning them find validation for my thinking in the lyrics of a song each on two of them?!!

Nick Cave’s ‘Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!’ pressed into oily, rich, satanic black 180 gramme vinyl suggests an artisan at work tattooing a litany of sins and black portents upon the skin of Lazarus himself. In typical N.C. fashion all the lyrics revolve around the push and pull of sex and death yet here the underlying theme is of resurrection and a return to the grave as if the grave is a better place than the world currently is. Quite by coincidence the story of Lazarus provides a fitting metaphor for the resurrection of the vinyl record.

Along with the album comes a free 7″ single with a 7 minute long song pressed over two sides called ‘More News From Nowhere.’ In its epic journey, Cave bangs [pun intended] into woman after woman in a world of no consequence, of ‘news from nowhere,’ as if he’s hearing nothing but white noise from all the multimedia outlets, as if its the end of decency; a Rovian embrace of the end of history, a plague on us all this constant transmission from each of us to millions of others often unknown and without consequence – until its too late.

don’t it make you feel so sad, don’t the blood rush to yr feet
to think that everything you do today
tomorrow is obsolete
technology & women & little children too
don’t it make you feel blue, don’t it make you feel blue
for more news from nowhere, more news from nowhere
don’t it make you feel alone
don’t it make you wanna get right back home
more news from nowhere
more news from nowhere
goodbye/goodbye/goodbye

Wonderfully bleak but kinda makes me reconsider Twitter.

I also picked up ‘Cardinology’ from Ryan Adams and his Cardinals. Although a talented and prolific song writer he isn’t in the same league as Cave. Adams gets to a deep grey but never reaches the dark bloody hues that Cave revels in. [BTW, Cave is an apt surname now I think about it.] ‘Cardinology’ is strong but no game changer like Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!.

The song here that caught my attention is ‘Magick’ – where a song is often the total sum of our emotional response to music, wherever we hear it, however we hear it we can’t deny it. In ‘Magick’ Adams suggest it rights all wrongs, overcomes rogue nation states’ sabre rattling, fends off missile attacks and shuts down “power hungry clowns.” He says “give ‘em radios & heels and wake ‘em up with jams.”

I wish I had secret powers, I’d find all the power hungry clowns
and I would shut them down
Give ‘em radios & heels and wake ‘em up with jams on
right after I disappear then disarm, disarm, disarm
and watch the record go round….

In these lyrics the music is on vinyl and the theme is again resurrection – the record keeps on going round. It’s recurring, ‘Magick’ is the power it always brings to challenge popular culture and most importantly, politics. It’s also about addiction.

Pearl Jam visited this space well before Adams with their song ‘Spin The Black Circle’ released on Vitalogy in 1994. This from Wikipedia – According to singer Eddie Vedder, the track is about his and the band’s love for vinyl records. At the band’s July 1, 2003 show in Bristow, Virginia at the Nissan Pavilion, Vedder proclaimed “This song is about old records, old records, anyone remember old records?”

The lyrics play on the similarities between drug addiction and addiction to records and music, as many of the lyrics may be interpreted either way. It is unclear to what extent this is intended to be a serious comparison of different types of addiction and to what extent it is just intended to make the lyrics interesting. Jon Pareles of The New York Times referred to “Spin the Black Circle” as “one of the few songs from Seattle in which a needle has nothing to do with heroin.”

All for the love of vinyl.. Vinyl has a special place in the hearts of a certain demographic – I’d guess those in their late teens and early twenties, definitely those over 40, DJ’s, analog freaks and audio purists. Vinyl brings something to the ear and the heart that MP3s don’t – full-range emotional sonic ra[n]ge…

On a side note it is obvious to many that vinyl has seen a substantial rise in sales over the last few years. Whilst still a small percentage of overall music sales it is carving out its niche amongst music lovers. The labels have embraced this in different ways, mainly through different incentives in the area of giving away MP3 downloads with the vinyl purchase. For the Cave release, Anti allows 3 downloads, presumably as back up should you lose the files, but asks for an email address. Lost Highway offers only 1 download of the Ryan Adams album but doesn’t ask for an email address. Amazingly Warp offers no downloads at all for the Nightmares On Wax album.

Irony of irony’s – after they have fought tooth and nail against the drop in CD sales, music retailers are selling USB record players! Perhaps a better move would be to sell medium to high end turntables. It’s a hardware and software play.

For anyone who has been aware of Marshall McLuhan’s life and work and who have read his many books and essays, he is perhaps best remembered for the slogan The Medium is the Message upon which he elaborated in his 1964 book, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’

For those who know the slogan but not the man or meaning behind it a timely book published by Mark Batty Publisher came out late last year entitled Everyman’s McLuhan written by W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji and Jacob Albert. It’s basically a primer for those interested in McLuhan and who are ready to plunge into his work.

This is a pocket-sized book that’s handy to have around; you can pick up this book and start at any page, you can jump around too without losing the thread and it’s also worth having just for the graphic design. The writers also provide the back story to some of McLuhan’s writings including the slogans. For instance they flesh out his thinking behind “The Medium Is The Message.” They ask “How can the medium be the message? How can the television circuits, screen etc. be the ad coaxing us to buy?” They let us know that McLuhan never intended his phrase to have such a literal meaning. He often rephrased the slogan to fit different audiences and those paraphrases are not that well know. Here’s one – “The medium is the message, but the user of the medium is the content of the medium, in the sense that any medium is an extension of the human body.” By that he could mean that a mobile phone is an extension of our ears. The idea then extends itself to this – “The medium is an environment that produces effects.” I recommend picking up this fascinating book, it’s a mere $12.71 at Amazon right now.