Context – editing

Today is Record Store Day, which is a day of consumerism I can usually get behind.  I’m not normally into Black Friday and Door Busting kinds of deal days–these sorts of celebrations of Capitalism just always feel wrong to me.  That and the deals usually aren’t very good.  But RSD “supports” a few things I can get behind: independent record stores, artists, and the general promotion of the vinyl revival.  So I suck it up and do the thing and buy some records today.

For reasons tied entirely to population density compared to record availability, I made the trip down to Peoria to visit with some friends.  We’re also working on a pilot together, so the idea was to buy some records and listen to them while we do some edits and punch up our script.

I thought I only wanted two records today–Coheed and Cambria’s Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Volume 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness and The Distillers Coral Fang.  My first bin I also found copies of a Bright Eyes record I enjoy, and a Sunny Day Real Estate record I’ve been meaning to listen to.  What floored me was the price of these records, which was a whopping $35 each.

This is insanity.

I expected to pay $20-25 per record and maybe grab another record or two from the used bin to round out an $80 purchase.  Instead I left with only the Coheed record, and a surprise printing of Run The Jewels’ third album, the appropriately titled RTJ 3.  I figured I owed RTJ about $30 since they let you download their music for free, but $35 for a record is insulting.  As such this will probably be my last RSD–I’d much rather save $100 and just pick an arbitrary day to support my local record store.

My buddy picked up a copy of The Queen Symphony, which is an awesome album.  I didn’t realize you could elevate the drama of Queen until I heard them interpreted and performed by a full symphony.  This has all the gravitas of a Tchaikovsky  overture with all the familiarity of the melodies that have likely been the background of your lives.

This creates an interesting effect in my imagination since I’m not super familiar with Queen’s music.  I enjoy it, and their talent and impact on pop-culture is undeniable.  But I don’t actively put Queen on with any regularity.  As such, I had a hard time placing these out-of-place feeling melodies into a context that triggered something in my memory.  The overall impression is one of simultaneous innovation and adhering to an unspoken tradition.

I dig what the Vitamin String Quartet does with pop music, but the extra instrumentation of a symphony really works for this project.  I wonder what the likelihood that the Chicago Philharmonic will perform this any time soon.