Taking the piss: a brief history of novelty vinyl pressings
I hate to break it to you, but buying music for music’s sake seems to be a thing of the past.
Even for someone like me, who grew up in the dying days of the music industry as a functioning industry, looking back at the prices that could be charged for an album is enough for a double-take. In fact, nothing proves the sheer Scrooge McDuck level of coinage music industry bigwigs were swimming through in the 1980s and 1990s quite like the fact that they could charge 20 big ones for an album and millions of people would pay up for it. It’s even more mind-boggling when you account for inflation. In 1990, $20 had the spending power that $50 does today.
So, while that was broadly speaking the upper limit of what was charged for albums, even half that price was some serious moolah back in the day. Today, it seems truly bizarre for that kind of money to be raised simply due to the sale of music to consumers. Looking at the music industry today sometimes feels like you’re looking at one massive, panicked pitching session. A bunch of suits are desperately trying to figure out what people like in order to squeeze money from them. The music is simply what brings consumers to the dance; it’s the Fortnite skin that’ll truly rake in the dosh.
Even for musicians under the level of global megastardom, the dance is more or less the same, with a few fewer options. While I desperately hope for the day I can get a Victory Royale in my limited edition Expert in a Dying Field Elizabeth Stokes from The Beths skin, until then, the best we’ve got is products that people feel are actually worth paying for. For most indie artists that means making genuine artefacts out of their albums, and making artisan releases of their records, usually in vinyl, that people will want for the sake of wanting the product, not just the music within it.
Broadly speaking, this is a good thing. Especially when the market for music at every level does seem to live and die on catering for a smaller selection of die-hard followers rather than reaching into the mainstream these days. However, in chasing a product that people will actually pay for, some artists go to some strange and in some cases, outright depraved places.
What are the weirdest vinyl pressings ever?
Among the first to try this were, weirdly enough, the Japanese perfume house Shiseido. They commissioned ambient musician Hiroshi Yoshimura to create an album to complement one of their fragrances in 1984. Yoshimura made the album, Air In Resort, and when the vinyl record was packaged, it was liberally sprayed with the perfume before being sealed in a plastic bag, then sleeved. To this day, original copies of the album still have the scent over four decades later.
Honestly, that’s basically the last time that a vinyl like that ever smelt good. In the last decade and a half, artists have seemingly placed bets within themselves to press the grossest things imaginable into their records. Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips got the ball rolling in 2010 by filling a limited run of ten copies of The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends with the bloody of said Heady Fwends. Emo titans Fall Out Boy pressed a limited run of their album So Much (For) Stardust with actual tears from the band members, fittingly enough.
Then you get the truly abhorrent stuff. Melbourne band Private Function pressed a run of their album Gold that had a vial of their own piss in the middle of it. Grossest of all, and you really have to feel for the artisans who put this all together, if it’s not a lie, came from the Swiss performance art duo Black Sun Productions. These records were reportedly pressed in human shit. The kind that the press release helpfully informed us all were “haemorrhoid-infected”.
Suddenly, the Fortnite skins don’t seem so bad anymore, do they?
