Pam Griffin
My name is Pam Griffin. Music and records have been my primary hobby for almost five decades. I’m happily married, have a doctorate in anthropology, and have been a full-time college professor for 20 years. As for the rest, they say you can learn a lot about a person from their record collection. [pamsrecordcollection.com]
I’m going to come to the part I’ll express my jealousy about your collection in a minute but I want to start with your article, The Vinyl Revival and Status in the Age of Social Media. It’s such a good read on the relationship between record collecting and social status. Will you please tell us a few words about it?
Thank you! It’s essentially my thoughts on the vinyl revival and why it happened; namely, that it’s linked to the rise of social media. Yes, records sound better than CDs and they’re more satisfying aesthetically – I firmly believe all of that. But I think another reason for vinyl’s successful re-entry in the music market is because we’ve learned how to use records as status markers. Maybe that was always done with small groups of friends, but now it’s in front of a global audience so the power of that act is hugely amplified. Social status, the concept of “lifestyle,” and conspicuous consumption are all things that I talk about in my classes as an anthropology professor, so for a while I’ve been thinking about them in relation to record collecting. That blog post was an effort to synthesize my thoughts, really.
You must have answered this a million times but why have you been collecting records?
Actually, not many people ask me that. They ask how many I have and how long I’ve been doing it, but not why I’ve been doing it. It’s an interesting question. I think there’s the larger question of why people collect anything, to which there’s not just one answer. One of them has to do with collecting as a way to connect the various eras of your life, and I think that’s a deep-seated motive for me. Some of my earliest memories are of music and records. This is because my family members were all very into music and my father was a musician. People find different ways to process the continuity of their life experience so that you bring something from the past into your present and you don’t just have these discreet units of childhood, teenage, and adult experiences. I do it with music and records. Music helps me to remember and frame my own life’s narrative.
I also think that I learned this hobby from my mother. She collected records but not to the extent that I do.
Shortly after Alan Zweig released his documentary [Vinyl, 2000], things began to change. Vinyl records became increasingly fetishized – they took on meaning above and beyond their physical properties.
The Vinyl Revival and Status in the Age of Social Media, Pam Griffin [2021]
How does it feel to own one of the most envied living/listening rooms on earth?
That’s very kind of you but I don’t know that it’s true. Actually, I’ve been thinking about either downsizing my collection or at least trying to keep it the same size, which of course means I’ll have to sell some records as I get new ones. I sort of jinxed myself recently by thinking that, because I bought a collection of over 100 classical music records for almost nothing. I just couldn’t pass it up.
Are you completely against digital? Do you have a Spotify account, for example? Or, do you ever go on YouTube to listen to a song or two?
I think streaming has its place. I regularly go online to listen to tracks off an album that I’m considering buying. I also stream music if I read an interesting review and want to check out the album, or if I had music suggested to me. But to really listen to music, no. I have a hard time connecting to music that’s not on a physical format.
How many hours a day do you spin records? And when you pick your record of the day to share on Instagram, is it usually whatever you are actually listening to that day? What I mean is, if they are your babies, how do you manage to remain fair?
How much time I spend really varies from day to day. If I really have a lot of free time, I might spend about four hours. I try to listen to at least one record a day. I also think silence is important; I don’t want to have music on in the background all the time if I’m not paying attention to it.
Yes, I usually post what I’m listening to at the time. More rarely, I post a picture of a record that I was listening to the previous day. I don’t post everything that I listen to, as I think that my feed would become annoying.
I have to ask this to a collector like yourself and I am aware of the difficulty level of the question: What would be your all-time favorite 5 records?
Pam’s all-time favorites:
1. “Rubber Soul” – The Beatles
2. “Darkness On the Edge of Town” – Bruce Springsteen
3. “Live at the Harlem Square Club” – Sam Cooke
4. “Mama Africa” – Peter Tosh
5. “The Gift” – The Jam
Can you tell us some of your international favorites?
I really like the Thai band Loso, but I don’t think their albums ever came out on vinyl. Same for another favorite, which is Huun Huur Tu. In the realm of Hawaiian music, I like the Hui Ohana, Sons of Hawai’i, Gabby Pahinui, and Olomana, to name a few. Fela Kuti is a favorite.
Our interview series is based on the songs we play on repeat. What is an all-time song you have played on repeat the most if you had to pick only one?
That’s a tough one! I’ll go with Michael Nesmith’s Some of Shelly’s Blues.
