Digital plastic

Got me one of them spiffy USB turntables for Christmas and suddenly my shelf of useless vinyl isn’t so useless anymore.

This thing is ridiculously cool. Right now I’m listening to the 12″ remix of The Mighty Lemon Drops’ “Inside Out” on my computer. (Last time I heard that was, unexpectedly, the Gilmore Girls finale.) Vinyl to iTunes. Life is good.

So I’ve been sitting here with the stack o’ records — all the stuff that, for one reason or another, I never managed to upgrade to CDs and/or never got around to selling before the used vinyl market crashed: Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Fables of the Reconstruction, The Clash, I Predict 1990, The Blind Leading the Naked, Beauty and Sadness, More Songs About Buildings and Food …

Plus all the stuff I could never find on CD — like The Swimming Pool Q’s “Firing Squad for God.” Or the first three Tonio K. albums:

i wake up every morning
i go to sleep each night
the communists, muslims
and warmonger texans
are still tryin’ to ruin my life
’cause all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
and all the king’s idiot sons
ain’t never in all of their glorious battles
solved anything with a gun

That’s from “Trouble” off of Amerika, which I hadn’t heard since the last needle for my old turntable died (even though, it turns out, you can find it on CD now).

Oh, and I haven’t tried it yet, but this turntable also allows you to play cassettes and load those songs into iTunes as .mp3s. I haven’t opened my Big Box O’ Cassettes since the Chevette with the tapedeck died. I’m not even sure why I was keeping those, but now I’m glad I did.

I’m vaguely worried that the RIAA Police are going to show up to confiscate my new turntable. Devices like this deprive them of their “right” to double- and triple-charge consumers for the same music every time the technology changes. The songs on my shelf o’ vinyl were all bought and paid for, but just the once, and in their view that probably constitutes theft or piracy or somesuch.