Rescued From The Fire: Chairman Mao
An ongoing series in which we ask artists the record they’d risk life and limb to save from a burning inferno
The American author Barry Schwartz came out with a book recently entitled "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less." A thought provoking tome, the argument Schwartz puts forth is that the more options one is faced with, the less satisfying the ultimate choice will be. The book probably should have included a chapter on record collecting, as ego trip's Chairman Jefferson Mao displays in the 25th edition of Rescued From The Fire below where he gets all metaphysical and contemplative and shit...
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Believe me when I tell ya, good people, that the question posed by this section of the Academy cyberspacial experience isn’t so easy for yours truly to answer. Buying old records is indeed a habit; one that I’ve been compulsively partaking in for way much longer (and along the way siphoning way too much loot out my bank account) than I should probably publicly admit. (Though full disclosure: in the time that it’s taken me to compose this paragraph alone I’ve managed to set sniper bids on five separate eBay record auctions, and complete a half-dozen discogs transactions without ever once lifting my palms off tha ol’ trusty MacBook Pro.)
In other words I’ve acquired a ton of records in my lifetime with no sign of stopping anytime soon. That said, if forced to choose to save just one of these various slabs of wax from a fiery death… I don’t know. Without jinxing myself horribly, I think I might just wanna let ’em all burn. Blasphemous thought, I know. But here’s (possibly) why:
1 - My collection – though partially alphabetized (as in the part I don’t listen to as much) – is way too unorganized for me to find anything I’d probably really wanna save. There’s definitely several old rap and disco 12-inches that I haven’t been able to locate for about 8 years. I think they may have sprouted legs in a display of Darwinian evolutionary genetic mutation, and moved out the house into some more appreciative owner’s crate when I wasn’t paying attention (which, by the way, is all the time).
2 - The album of recorded music that I probably listen to with the most regularity these days – The Who’s Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, which is basically like a not-so-comprehensive greatest hits package that originally came out in the early ’70s that my 3-and-a-half-year-old son now wants to hear at least once a day because I made the mistake of showing him a YouTube clip a while back of the band smashing its instruments to bits after plowing through “My Generation” on the Smothers Brothers Show – is something I don’t actually even own on vinyl. So while I could perhaps try to run into a burning building to save the mp3 of the LP that I downloaded illegally off the interwebz (hey, sorry, ASCAP; don’t sue my ass), I might as well just save a really comfortable pair of socks.
3 - I’m wondering if being free of all these records would actually be a good thing. Because when I stop to think about it maybe I’m in fact not so addicted to the records themselves so much as I am addicted to the ritual of acquiring them. Which is something I find therapeutic as fuck. In fact, the only thing about getting records that I don’t find soothing is the guilt that occasionally rears its ugly head when I’m buying them. A big-ass fire might actually take care of that. It might absolve me of these pangs of guilt that I feel from buying these records all the friggin’ time when I’ve got way more records than I have remaining living hours on this earth to listen to, much less enjoy, them all. As John and Yoko once sang, it’d be just like starting over…
And then of course you gotta figure in the fact that being hung up on saving a record once you’ve reached a certain point in life where you got a wife, kids and pets and whatnot is kind of a shitty look. So fuck it. Granted, I’ll probably stay getting records till the end of foreverandeverandeverandever-time because I’m frankly just hopeless like that. But, oy… the thought of actually trying to salvage a singular one of these things out of an inferno? Crap, my head hurts just mildly contemplating it. We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn. Burn, motherfucker. Burn.
