February 14, 2018

YouTube was founded on Valentines Day 2005. I remember the first time I logged on thirteen years ago in my office at Portland State. A grad student told me I could find some vintage Pink Floyd performances on this new platform. One search, and I was off into the clickstream of random short clips (with not an ad in sight!). Everything imaginable was suddenly just a button away, from old movie trailers to speeches by Serbian nationalists.

I started my own channel in 2009 to “vlog” a cross-country trip, from Portland to Atlanta and back to Portland, that stopped at numerous famous crime scenes. It was a downer travelouge but highly educational. The clip I recorded in Jasper, Texas, sight of the 1998 dragging death of of James Byrd, Jr., has nearly 20,000 views. More recently the channel has turned into a place to chronicle Cozy’s evolution and all around cuteness. I’ve never seen a penny from any of these videos. It’s just been a place to share.

As Andrea and I were scratching our heads about how to get through this period of diminished income, she mentioned that millennials are turning YouTube into a revenue generator. There are a ton of channels that I don’t quite understand making bank on monetizing viewership. The top ranked channel is tseries, which shows Bollywood music and movie clips from India. With over 31 billion views, it generates close to $100,000 a day. A day. Channels dedicated to toy reviews have billions of plays. Billions.

This week Andrea and I join their ranks. We thought it would be fun to film us doing what we do best (OK, second best), talking about music. We have a lot of great cross-generational, Gen X to Millennial, chats about records. I love sharing my “ancient” twentieth century music with someone born after the creation of MTV and she shares some amazing discs from south of the border.  She was born in southern Mexico and I grew up in the suburban South. We both value the totality of a great record. I gave her Patti Smith and she gave me Café Tacvba.

We’re happy to launch the Vinyl Fetish Club on YouTube, where we wander into my record collection and I play some choice platters for my beloved wife. There will be some great sociological discussions, but I have a feeling the best part will be charting her reactions as I lay some Dead Kennedys and King Crimson on her orejas. Viewers might enjoy that sight more than me explaining why a guy from Fugazi producing a Bikini Kill record matters. She’s a lot to take in when a good tune is blasting out of the crappy Service Merchandise stereo in my record room. Hot blooded, check it and see.

Our first episode is dedicated to the ever controversial Ted Nugent and his 1977 classic album Cat Scratch Fever. We ask the question, can shitty people make great art? Nugent is among the shittiest, but that is still a great album. And before you get all high and mighty liberal, most of the music you love was made by seriously flawed people. John Lennon admitted that he beat his first wife, so does that put The Beatles off limits? So we start with a challenging call to love the jam while rejecting the man.

Please subscribe. We plan to upload a video each week and there will certainly be diversions from our “record review” theme. I don’t expect to have as many subscribers as JustinBieberVevo (16,941,467,020), but I can promise it will be highly entertaining.  And fledgling hipsters can pick up some inside info impress their lame peers. And also, Andrea. Happy birthday, YouTube.