45 Revolutions

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Well, there's a bit of personal history involved featuring the above artefact, newly unearthed by Jane today. The object itself spans generations: the 45RPM single record effectively created youth culture in the 1950s [anyone who carps on about Presley 78s - yes, I know... but the 45 opened Pandora's Box and marked out youth from their forebears as a distinct tribe], and had a long and varied history throughout the next forty years, with knock backs and rebirths along the way, as other technologies came and went. It's fair to say that the single's day is probably over in the mainstream, unlike it's elder sibling the 33RPM Long Player, which is set this year to outsell CDs.

Although mainstream music culture thrives in the streaming world, the parsimony of its monetizing model from an artist's point of view, its lack of an 'owned-when-purchased-object', and its sterile void of soul as a medium, I think a sea-change will come at some point in the not-too-distant, and a shift back towards 'real' product will happen. It's happened before, and there's no particular reason to suggest that it won't happen again.

The single pictured was released when I was just five years old and would have been on the radio when I started school for the first time. It featured on Forces radio - 'Two-Way Family Favourites' - regularly on Sunday afternoons throughout the 1960s, and was on the jukebox in the bottom Swan pub in Stourbridge, when I was an art student in the 1970s.

Listening to it now, as when I listen to Sergeant Barry Sadler's 'The Green Beret' from the late sixties, I still harbour a faint suspicion that there might be irony at work, but then rationality kicks in, and I think, nah, they really believed in this shit. Doesn't make the records any less listenable, though, even if you're the one listening ironically.

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