Vinyl Wankers – 5 / The Jazz Aficionado

Ritterstrasse – a magical place for Colognian record collectors, because it is the name of a small street in whose horizontal vanishing point lies the majestic Cologne Cathedral, and a street that also houses 4 directly adjacent independent record stores, with another big corporate one in direct sight at the end of the road.

You usually enter the Ritterstraße with a mix of excitement and anticipation, that can only be described as digger’s delight. You see collectors immersed in their crates, grumpy shop-owners and their loyal customers lost in conversation, and the vinyl wankers being vinyl wankers. In warmer days, record collecting fans will gather on the narrow sidewalk in front of the shops, smoke a cigarette, drink a beer, talk about bands and gigs, and show each other their new purchases before they move on to the next store. All in all, the Ritterstrasse is a nice, unpretentious place where you can drift for an entire afternoon.

All of the above mentioned doesn’t count for the one Jazz record store located in the street, let’s call that one ‘Arrogance Records‘. You have to walk past it to get to the other two record stores, but when you get close to it, you start to feel a noble force trying to pull you out of its energy field, a divine committee to preserve your purity. Walking past it is a strange moment on low frequency, which has the feeling of flaw and stigma attached to it, similar to the moment when a room full of people stops talking and starts whispering conspicuously as soon as you enter the room. The Jazz shop has the aura of the annoying and superfluous, and its visitors display mannerisms which you want to avoid at all costs.

When Arrogance Records opened, I made the mistake to going in out of curiosity. I should have known better: in the shop window there was only a vase with five purple gladiolus. The aesthetic scheme was being continued on the walls and the interior: furniture from the upper Ikea price segment, everything neat, and very important: *tastefully* painted walls with framed elements – if you ask me, an annoying feminization of the record store, which I prefer a little wild, messy, and with yellowed posters attached to the wall with thumbtacks.

Anyway, for all aesthetical sensitivity I actually don’t care about the looks, cats, dogs, or furniture of a record-store. In the Jazz store, something else met my eyes as first thing: the two shop owners sitting next to each other on a chair, with the latest fancy Tupperware filled with some kind of grainy superfood on both their laps- because you live in times where you have to eat everywhere and all the time to show off your diet and virtues. Btw, ‘superfood’ = food that has been eaten by certain nations and cultures for hundreds of years, for which this culture gets mocked first, until Western culture ennobles it by absorbing it under various lifestyle paradigms and new vocabulary to mark discourse-ownership of the matter. Sounds like the history of Jazz? Oh well…

Interlude: are grainy super-food eating, health-obsessed, vegetarian (wo)men sexy? Absolutely not. It would be great fun for me to throw a cave-man swinging a leg of meat in such an environment, and lock the door. After done work he could come out, shoulder me like Godzilla, and carry me away… but I digress.

The two men with Tupperware on their necessarily crossed legs are starring at me, and although they bear no resemblance, they do remind me of the twins in The Shining. They do not greet although they own the shop, their superelevated self-conception makes it impossible to be friendly or let go of the amateurishly crafted casual / cool mask they have imposed on themselves.

The shop is quiet and more of a library than a music hall – solid tones in a dignified volume with the occasional muffled outcry of a saxophone. There is no customer in the store except for a prototype of the new contemporary Jazz fan. One who has not indulged in this music for all his life; his love for Jazz normally doesn’t start before reaching the age 35 (the new adolescent years)- just when the groove slowly starts to leave your body- contradicting the genre’s derivation from “jasm”, an obsolete slang term meaning ‘pep, energy’. Hence, Jazz becomes an academic matter cleansed of that energy, and a supplier of feelings of superiority, with this ungroovy male feeling the need to take care of this music and finally explain it to the world.

If you meet this guy, eye-contact and small talk should be avoided at all costs- maybe the reason for why Arrogance Record Stores are quiter than other record stores. Because the Jazz fan reaches his limits in trying to grasp and verbalize this music, but instead of keeping his mouth shut, we will hear subjectively emotional or esoteric interpretations of the instrumentals. The Jazz aficionado will slowly also get involved in the emphatically confident use of terms like ‘date’. Casual, as if he had done nothing else than attending such ‘dates’ all of his life, and with the pride of having learned a insider-term and putting it in sophisticated use. Hard to imagine lovers of other instrumental forms like the desert drones of Kyuss or Sunn O))) talking like that.

In the meanwhile, outside on the pavement: the buzz of the three other record store’s visitors, drinking a Becks and smoking a fag, chatting and planning their night in order to get a real ‘date’ with a sexual happy end. Switch to Arrogance Records: hip tote bags full of expensive coffee beans, craft beer and yoga food for the preparation of a quiet and culturally sublime evening in the company of Blue Note labels. The elitist attitude of the Jazz wanker often manifests itself in the unhealthy obsession with first pressings and the perfect audio system. Never in my life have I met a laid-back and passionate Jazz fan who said something like “Who cares about the pressing, I die for this album, I’ll listen to it through my phone’s speakers”.

Jazz records are probably the most democratic ones- everybody can pretend to be a bit intelligent and sophisticated by owning one and watching Woody Allen movies. As a rule, the Jazz fan (Mr. Pumpernickel) either has no opinion of other genres, or he has an extremely limited and shitty taste in other areas. It’s like Mr. Pumpernickel is saying: “Hey. I read Shakespeare, it must be enough as a sign of my intelligence and sophistication. Otherwise, I like to read crime and thrillers.” Never let him write a history book either- you’ll rarely get an update that goes beyond the 70s.

I’ll stop here, it’s getting too much to handle for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that the contemporary Jazz-culture is purely pronounced shit with the most pretentious fans and that is doesn’t have lots of normal appreciators out there- but we’re talking about the vinyl wankers in this column. On the next episode: The morally supreme ‘humble’ Country music fan.

by Saliha Enzenauer

(Read all Vinyl Wankers episodes here)