Chloe Walchesky
Music has always been a vital piece of American culture.The music city of Nashville is home to underground artists clawing their way up the chain of popularity. Musicians craft words of passion used to unite and spread messages to the masses. As our country shifts, so do our forms of expression.
The record player, first named the phonograph and was invented around 1857. Since then, music accessible to the family home has come a long way.Families would gather around and listen to music together.
In the 1980’s cassette tapes became popularized and allowed for mobile use. For once, people could carry music on their person and listen to it virtually anywhere. The late 90s and early 2000s brought a new form of music to the public, CDS. These disks could hold a large amount of songs and were extremely thin. These differed greatly from the large vinyl disks formerly used. Pretty soon, record stores faded into obscurity and CD stores popped up. These CD stores were like the blockbuster for music, housing anything from hip-hop to heavy metal.
The late 2000s brought forth something never seen before, online music stored within a cloud. Users could upload playlists with hundreds of songs that simply get stored on a digital cloud. These songs could then be accessed in one click. Long gone were the days of picking out your favorite CD or vinyl and carefully placing it in or on a machine. Buying CDs was relatively deemed pointless with the younger generations. Why would you need a physical copy when you could access any album online? The same goes for movies and streaming devices.
Like most things, record players seem to have struck a chord with the younger generation and come back for a new life. This came out of left field for most older outside observers. The moderate price of a new generation record player allows accessibility to thousands. There is a certain charm factor about hearing your favorite artist on a crisp vinyl. The delicate needle is placed on the record, emitting a melody with every spin. The recent popularization of vinyl records has even benefited CD stores that now carry modern artists LP albums within their stores. Collecting vinyl records is no longer a niche activity among the youth.
The revamp of these ancient relics from the past poses a question for the future. Will everything make its way back to popularity? This is a hard prophecy to fulfill, but as the years pass most things seem to resurface. The typewriter, invented around 1867 has crept its way back into the hearts of big city poets and quaint writers. Are these simply fads or are they staples of culture destined to stay for longer than anticipated?
