As culture trends often come back every few decades, styles can overlap so much that almost anything is popular.
Mainstream tastes evolve every day, but some people still prefer the classics—vinyl records, vintage clothing from thrift shops, and the aroma of home-cooked meals.
Vinyl Revival
Harrison Kern, a Ball State University student studying telecommunications with a focus in audio, still remembers the first vinyl record he ever bought. The yellow sheen of the plastic matched the colors on the cover. The Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction came packaged with a T-shirt.
Harrison started collecting vinyl when his dad got him interested in classic rock records nine years ago. Flipping through his dad’s collection, Harrison would read the liner notes—basic information printed on the vinyl sleeve—long before he ever had a record player to listen to the songs.
According to Nielsen Holdings Company, more than 14 million vinyl records were sold in the United States in 2017, compared to less than 1 million in 2005.
Harrison typically spends anywhere from $5-20 on one used record, but it’s still high quality. He says that a newer pressing of vinyl might be worth more, costing anywhere from $20-40. He’s spent up to $40 for a German import of My Bloody Valentine’s MBV album.
Matt Vice, an instructor of music media production and industry at Ball State, says vinyls were the only way to get recorded music between the 1940s and the 1980s, when CDs emerged. The Library of Congress’s records show the “digital music revolution” began in the late 1990s, when digital encoding and digital miniatures came into the picture.
The ancestry of vinyl includes the creation of the phonautograph in 1857 and the phonograph by Thomas Edison in 1877. Ten years later the term ‘gramophone’ was made for a system that played cut disc records similar to the ones we use today. The early 1900s saw a mass production of recordings and disc vinyls. But later that century, new competitors began popping up as music became portable. With 1980 came the Walkman, a portable cassette player, followed three years later by CDs and digital audio. In 1999, iTunes was created.
Despite technology and programs such as Spotify or iTunes making music so easily accessible and cheap, the U.S. Music Mid-Year Report shows that from 2017 to 2018, there has been a 19 percent increase in vinyl sales.
Muncie’s Village Green Records, owned by Travis Harvey and founded 12 years ago, is a hot spot for Ball State students interested in vinyl. Harvey says he never expected to see this kind of spike in record sales, but he enjoys seeing the variety of people who visit his store.
Harvey says a desire for the kind of tactile experience Harrison described is common among people looking to buy vinyl.
“There is a ritual-like quality to owning, collecting, and spinning records,” he says. People tend to listen to music on vinyl with more of a purpose. He believes this connection between man and music is physical and beautiful, and it makes people more likely to branch out and listen to different genres.
Harvey thinks the rising appeal of vinyls could be somewhat of an escape from digital streaming. Major label companies have also been pressing modern pop music, such as Ed Sheeran’s Divide.
Christoph Thompson, an assistant professor of music technology at Ball State and a recording engineer, says listening to vinyls is purely a personal preference based on what kind of experience the person desires.
Harrison likes being able to listen to albums straight through, front to back, as he feels the singer intended. He feels this inability to hit shuffle morphs the musical experience into something with more depth than a song on an iPod, and he loves the authentic feeling of pulling the record from its sleeve.
“I find that it’s easier for me to discover and appreciate new and different music when I’m collecting vinyl,” Harrison says. “So, whenever I’m itching to listen to something new, I go to the record store and stock up on things that I haven’t heard before, or music that’s recommended to me.”
When shopping for vinyl, Harrison usually spends between $150-200 at a time, usually every six months or so. He also receives crates from other people, though most simply collect dust either from disinterest or lack of available time. Yet there are always records that he holds close to his heart, such as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, gifted to him by his grandfather.
Prints of the Past
When Jasmin Shopp lived in California 12 years ago, flannel shirts were the norm. She often saw people wearing denim shorts over pantyhose, along with Vans shoes, so she dressed the part. When she moved back to Indiana wearing the West Coast trends, people looked at her like she was crazy. Now the owner of Vintage Shoppe Thrift & Gift in downtown Muncie, she’s watched those big-city trends come and go in Indiana, even if a couple years late.
When Jasmin started raising a family in Muncie five years ago, she noticed the city lacked a vintage thrift clothing store. So she decided to put her love of fashion and interior design to use.
According to thredUP, an online secondhand clothing store, from 2012 to 2017, the percent of used items in thrifters’ closets jumped from 11 percent to 24 percent, and by 2022, it is expected to be at 44 percent.
In the four years that Vintage Shoppe Thrift & Gift has been open, Jasmin has noticed her clientele usually range in age from 16 to 40, but her primary customers are college students.
Sometimes popular fashion changes faster than Jasmin can keep up. Right now, she said looks from the 70s and 90s are in style.
“About every 20-30 years, everything comes back around,” she says. “Now I see people wear so many different things that almost everything is in style.”
Items such as flared jeans, fanny packs, denim jackets, high-waisted jeans, button-up-the-front skirts, and “mom jeans” are in style today. Corduroy was big in the 70s, and now that’s coming back, too.
Cooking Up Comfort
For Alyssa Flandermeyer, cooking brings back fond memories. When she makes chocolate chip cookies, she remembers the first time she ever made them as a young girl—the smell of the kitchen, the spatula in her hand, and the dough in the mixing bowl. After helping her mom with the recipe several times, she learned to make it herself.
Now a 2018 Ball State alumna, she still comes back to those childhood recipes. But she also tinkers with foods from various cultures, branching into the exotic flavors of Indian cuisine, as well as foods of Western European descent, where many of her ancestors can be traced back to. She’s also fueled by the excitement on her co-workers’ faces when she brings freshly-baked, banana-nut bread to share.
