Snippets of previous owners' lives in used records
 

Often you hear record collectors claiming that vinyl has a soul that CDs don't, however occasionally you find something which suggests this, have you ever found a snippet of someone else's life in a used record? For example...

1) I've bought every Cocteau Twins LP I have from the same shop, which has evidently bought them from the same seller. Each of my Cocteau Twins records has "Happy Birthday Claire xxx" and a loving message from "mummy and daddy" written on the label. I find it very touching but also pretty creepy that I have four years worth of Claire's, whoever she is, birthday presents from her parents.

2) Once a love letter slipped out of a newly bought second hand Peter Gabriel IV LP, some guy proclaiming his undying love for his lady and his wish to spend the rest of his life with her.

3) The inner sleeve of my Highway 61 LP is someone's loving shrine to Dylan, with magazine photos, lyrics and cartoons of Dylan smoking joints.


I'd like to hear about other people's experiences with these rare but touching insights into the lives of others. Also, how do people find these discoveries, moving, funny, or creepy? go!

I found an old note someone had saved inside an old Police album I bought,.
it was a love letter. It is still in the vinyl. I saved it.

this is why I like to write things in library books, and I must go through 200-300 library books a year.

I don't know about vinyl, but Internet files can also have snippets of other people lives. I was watching this video on youtube and someone wrote that delicate message saying "if u dont copypaste this then ur mother will die". Cute, eh.

God, I FUCKING HATE it when people do that. You absolute fucking prick.

Every time I get a book from the the library and someone has written in it (usually in shit handwriting, usually in ink) I imagine some smug prick thinking they're somehow enhancing someone else's appreciation of a book by revealing something ABSOLUTELY AMAZING that NO-ONE OTHER THAN THAT SMUG CUNT could possibly have realised. What you're actually doing is annoying the fuck out of anyone else who's reading it.

The number of people who did that in uni... and they'd always right the most pointless, insipid horseshit in there. The only time it was redeeming was a 20-year conversation in the margins of Plato's republic (or possibly Aristotle's Politics, I forget) where one of our Greek protagonists talks about 'the right to have a slave' and the first person wrote something like '[x]'s racism invalidates his whole philosophy!!!' and loads of other readers (clearly being a bit brighter) wrote a series of brilliant insults ('ABSOLUTE. FUCKING. MORON.').

Otherwise, this is absolutely inexcusable behaviour.

I love these, particularly the dedications from Mummy & Daddy - 'Don't know if you're a bit old for this now... Love Mummy & Daddy' in a Peter Nero record.

My absolute favourite is a copy of Billy Bragg's 'life's a riot with Spy vs Spy' where someone has written 'To Sally - the dark edge of life. Don't ever forget it!' and then someone has crossed that out and written 'To Steve - hope you like it!' just underneath. I've wanted to cross out the second one and give it to someone for years, but I don't tend to go with girls who'd like the Braggmeister.

i once bought a book of poetry by some unknown author and in it was a dedication in pencil to some friendsm by the poet, so that was pretty cool. dont think it happened with an lp though

Ha, i love reading the shit written in old books(usually lovers shit or "fuck u")
and the funny ass arguments that go on through them. I know its stupid and wrong but it always makes me laugh. If theres a bunch of shit already on it, i cant help but scribble some stupid shit down too:eek:

I want to see these...

Its like a youtube comments page years ahead of its time; idealogical arguement that descends into petty slanging.

I love this sort of thing, but i cant remember any album ones ive got off the top of my head.
I remember buying a second hand computer game, a football game i think, and in the "notes" section at the back of the manual the previous owner had written "Whoever bys this your a fucking prick, this games shit"

i bought a vinyl copy of van morrisons astral weeks second hand a good few years back and on the run off someone etched "thank you for everything you have done, see you in 75 xxx"

curious.

How do we know it wasn't a message from the man himself?

Alot of second hand stuff I have has names written all over them, somtimes right on the cover, flamboyantly.

There was a record store in Belfast that had a Saxon album for sale that was legendary among my friends because there was dodgy polaroids of some middle aged fat woman in all sorts of positions in the sleeve.

The copy of Dinosaur Jr's Bug in Birmingham central library had a cartoonish drawing of some guy with CUNTOR written over the top, I remember the first time I saw it laughing my ass off.

When my friend/ex-boss at the record store would buy huge collections from people, especially really old collections, we would WITHOUT FAIL discover vintage porn in varying levels of explicitness hidden in amongst the vinyl.

One of these (a very elderly man who died at 90+) also had his own unique archiving/cataloging number system, pencilled on the back upper corner of each LP. When I would find these, I would always know they were his, and I always appreciated being able to erase the pencil. He had some foresight. I sold one of his records for a thousand dollars once, and I'm sure it would have gone for a lot less had he been doing his numbering in ink.

We didn't tell his bereaved family about all the porn.

no, i dont right intellectual notes/analysis in the margins, I just write like "Sonic Youth" or tag, or put "Rastafari Selassie I Vibrations" or other personal touches. I dont bother with putting my intepretations/analysis, I put those notes in notebooks.

I agree with this. Those cunts.

Oh, so it's just straight-up vandalism, then. OK.

library books and materials are public property.

"tagging" is for dipshits with tiny semi-functional dicks.

oh my god, it's just writing in books, get the fuck over it.

Yeah, I had higher hopes for this thread.

I thought this thread was going to be about Vinyl players recording conversations of their previous owners and ever so quietly etching them onto the record.

ha ha!

Or subtly etching a picture of their face onto the run-out...

I agree. I even hate dog-eared pages.

Beyond the occasional initials of the previous owner on the label, I don't think any used LP or CD I've bought has really had anything of the previous owner's in or on it. And I've bought a lot of the used stuff. I think this is mostly because I buy from record stores that pretty much just sell unsoiled and near perfect copies.

Sure, that's so convenient and pleasant to borrow a book and then discover that it's unreadable because idiots wrote comments or underlined words all over it...

yeah, they are "just books"

spoken like a true aliterate.

My friend's brother bought a PJ Harvey CD which for some reason had a poster of Steven Tyler folded up inside it. He proceeded to hang it upside down on his wall. Probably for the best really...

tagging is the world's oldest art-form, you just dont like it personally and that is fine, but know that writing/carving/painting yr name on walls is the oldest visual art form of humanity.

spitting pigment onto your hand so it leaves a trace on a rock or cave wall is NOT the same as endlessly writing down some stupid fucking 4-8 letter "tag" on public buildings, bridges, houses, fencing, light poles etc.

tags are NOT art. they are low-level graffitti, in the pejorative sense.

actualy grafftti art can be beautiful and very much art, but just writing your "name" over and over again? that is what children do.

dude, they are the EXACT same fucking thing. you can walk along old roman trade roads in Turkey and find thousands of people's names etched in stone, just their fucking name, just like the hit ups all over the world. why are you so anti-graf to begin with? whats the harm?

Tagging a library book is just destruction, pure and simple. Who wants to come to new book and find it adulturated with somebody elses insights, good or bad? That sucks. Libraries are there to preserve cultural artifacts of all kinds so that everyone can enjoy them, and all the so-called tagging does is degrade that effort.

Agreed. 'Tagging' in terms of grafitti is a territorialism, not an artform, and it makes sense within that context. I might not like it, but I accept it. Writing on a book that is common property (that is, desecrating public property that you've paid for by taxes etc) doesn't assert anything other that your own idiocy and disregard for other people's preferences. Sheer arrogance, and lacking in the arrogance that constitutes tagging as territorial.

that is NOT art. it is just names on walls. it is neat archeologically, and sociologically, but not art.

I love graffitti ART

I hate tagging.

it is the lowest, meanest, hoodlum bullshit end of the graffiti spectrum

this I call art



this, is just some assholes with a marker

who are you, the fucking art police? smash art-nazism!


art–noun 1.the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. 2.the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of art; an art collection. 3.a field, genre, or category of art: Dance is an art. 4.the fine arts collectively, often excluding architecture: art and architecture. 5.any field using the skills or techniques of art: advertising art; industrial art. 6.(in printed matter) illustrative or decorative material: Is there any art with the copy for this story? 7.the principles or methods governing any craft or branch of learning: the art of baking; the art of selling. 8.the craft or trade using these principles or methods. 9.skill in conducting any human activity: a master at the art of conversation. 10.a branch of learning or university study, esp. one of the fine arts or the humanities, as music, philosophy, or literature. 11.arts, a.(used with a singular verb
) the humanities: a college of arts and sciences. b.(used with a plural verb
) liberal arts. 12.skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature. 13.trickery; cunning: glib and devious art. 14.studied action; artificiality in behavior. 15.an artifice or artful device: the innumerable arts and wiles of politics. 16.Archaic. science, learning, or scholarship.

"Definitions of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of facts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, and it also, arguably, has trans-historical, trans-cultural characteristics that point in the direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core. (Theorists who regard art as an invention of eighteenth-century Europe will, of course, regard this way of putting the matter as tendentious, on the grounds that entities produced outside that culturally distinctive institution do not fall under the extension of “art” and hence are irrelevant to the art-defining project. (Shiner 2001) Whether the concept of art is precise enough to justify this much confidence about what falls under its extension claim is unclear.) Conventionalist definitions take art's cultural features to be explanatorily fundamental, and attempt to capture the phenomena —revolutionary modern art, the traditional close connection of art with the aesthetic, the possibility of autonomous art traditions, etc. — in social/historical terms. Non-conventionalist or “functionalist” definitions reverse this explanatory order, taking a concept like the aesthetic (or some allied concept like the formal, or the expressive) as basic, and aim to account for the phenomena by working that concept harder, perhaps extending it to non-perceptual properties."

The groundwork for institutional definitions was laid by Arthur Danto, better known to non-philosophers as the long-time influential art critic for the Nation. Danto coined the term “artworld”, by which he meant “an atmosphere of art theory.” Danto's definition has been glossed as follows: something is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii) about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style) (iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which ellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing, and (v) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof require an art historical context. (Danto, Carroll) Clause (v) is what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly rhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account of what makes a context art historical, and for not applying to music."