For The Record- 11. January. 2025

You're not punk and I'm tellin' everyone

Welcome to another edition of For The Record, the weekly newsletter that brings the world of music news straight to your inbox. Part essay, part good old-fashioned link drop, For The Record is a benefit for paid supporters of On Repeat. This project is 100% reader-funded. You can back independent ad-free music journalism for less than $1 a week.

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KA~

My son’s girlfriend got him copies of Alice Chains’ Facelift and Dirt albums for Christmas. They were the best gifts he received this year. She has good taste. 

That won’t surprise anyone reading this. Oh, Kevin liked someone getting records? That’s interesting news—eye roll. When I tell him how fortunate I feel to have been about his age when these came out, it’s his turn to roll his.

It’s true. I hate getting older, but I love being able to say “I was there,” and “I remember when…”

This isn’t so much a love letter to vinyl (been there done that, started a newsletter), but hopefully a final goodbye and good riddance to the gatekeepers and weird orthodoxies they used to wield over culture.

These two records—these simple inanimate objects—are part of a larger story. It is not just about the vitality of vinyl and its resilience in a time when music is further commoditized into 1s and 0s but also about the demise of said gatekeeper. To be clear, they're not yet extinct, but their prominence and relevance have greatly diminished.

In the summer of 2022, after watching the Vinyl Nation documentary, I wrote: