John Lydon on iPods and vinyl records

A video and some excerpts here of an interview with John Lydon. He’s talking about people using iPods to escape into ‘their own little universe’. I’m just trying to write a chapter on this for my book. He claims that iPods can’t ‘unite us’ in the way that vinyl records can. He talks about how important records were in music scenes, particularly in acting as focal points for creating connections with people. We might think this is all a bit of an out-dated view, and maybe it is. But there is an interesting suggestion here, which is that the material object is important in how cultures previously worked. The actual object played a part in events, identity, in the economy of music movements and most importantly in communicating something visually. This is not a negative thing, but I’m not clear on how things work now. here’s a bit more on this.

Advertisement