Friday, September 23, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 23, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 23, 2011



"I have something of a pet theory about LPs in charity shops, which is that while they can and do supply reams of fascinating data about the rise and fall of musical trends and formats, the shifts in status of artists as their records slide from ubiquity to obsolescence (oh, happy day it was when copies of No Jacket Required and Brothers In Arms started turning up in Help the Aged shops in the early 1990s), they also tell us (or did for a long time anyway) that Mantovani and his peers (Frank Chacksfield, Percy Faith, Bert Kaempfert, Ray Conniff, James Last, et al) once bestrode the world as musical colossi. Which, though probably truer than we'd like to admit, now seems unimaginable -- and odd.

"If, for example, some peculiar meteor were to strike the earth, triggering an even more bizarre apocalyptic event that wiped out at a stroke most of the globe's population and every LP ever made, except those stored in charity shops (bear with me on this: it's something to do with the uniquely awful window displays -- wonky dummies clad in previously unimaginable combinations of man-made fibre outfits and figurines of small children with dogs -- deflecting the vinyl-, cassette-, CD- and iPod-melting radiation), then future civilisations would be forced to conclude that Hawaiian Album, Silk and Steel and Strictly Mantovani were the acme of this lost world's musical achievements."

- Travis Elborough, from his book The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to IPod and Back Again.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Sep. 20, 2011

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