This article presents a case study of how obsolete vinyl records are transformed into concert souvenirs through fan labour, using it as a springboard for an enquiry into fan creativity – both in terms of making do with a culture that excludes materially disenfranchised fans, and also in terms of re-purposing objects and discovering new ways of deriving pleasure from their use. It shows how embodied knowledge and dispositions are deployed to casually resist an economy of alienation and obsolescence, how fan productions are often exchanged in both the cultural and financial economies, and, in so doing, makes an intervention into an under-researched aspect of metal culture and fan cultures more generally.
This article deals with vinyl records from the perspective of the cultural study of everyday life. It focuses on the author's rituals of vinyl consumption, using as a case study Deranged's Struck by a Murderous Siege (2016). It is shown that in an era of media convergence listening to vinyl records is an activity in which a variety of media participate in 'doing-listening', a process that involves the invocation of a unique secret knowledge developed over social relationships with people and things, and memories of past experiences, through which the intertextual nature of death metal texts is revealed and the doer-listener produces his or her own culture. In that sense, the value of vinyl records cannot be estimated in advance, based on 'objective' attributes-such as size of artwork, distinctiveness of sound, aura attribution or feelings of technostalgia-but, instead, accrues through the process of co-production through doing-listening with texts. production values and the existence of genres-are contingent upon the existence of the music industry. The various recording formats that have come and gone since the advent of the mass production of music are major parts of music consumption. By 1960, 'the LP was crowned the "core commodity" of the Western recorded music industry' (Devine 2015: 375). Currently, after more than a decade between the late 1980s and early 2000s, during which the music industry put its faith in CDs, and in the midst of the digital revolution, record stores are once again filled with vinyl records (Bartmanski and Woodward 2013; Hayes 2006). As Bennett and Rogers (2016: 31) have observed, 'aesthetic discourses of authenticity and coolness' over the last twenty years might have something to do with the so-called vinyl resurgence, while, according to Straw (2009: 79-82), 'the CD has become little more than an intermediate technology', and what we have observed is 'a collective abandonment of the CD as a meaningful cultural form'. However, the culture of listening to vinyl cannot be reduced to music industry decision making, to the material characteristics of the artefact, or to the pervasiveness of popular discourses that endow artefacts with meaning. Popular music artefacts, such as vinyl records, CDs or mp3s, are not meaningful until the consumers activate their meanings and insert them in their everyday lives (Fiske 1989a). This article is about what I, the consumer, make with a cultural commodity like a vinyl record from the perspective of the cultural study of everyday life. I will focus on my rituals of vinyl consumption,
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