Particular lyrics need to be considered now more than ever: “How many times must the shells fly / Before they’re banned forever?” is hitting hard after a series of mass shootings in the US. Even more the lines about the legislator’s willful ignorance of these murders: “How many ears must a man / To hear men cry? / Yes, and how many deaths will it take before he learns / that too many people have died?’ That Blowin’ in the Wind is so powerful and universal, its power so regenerating, makes it all the more grotesque that a single copy was cut and sold for £1.5m. For this sale at Christie’s auction house, Dylan re-recorded the song in the studio for the first time since its original recording in 1962. The recording was then etched onto a lacquer-coated aluminum disc – only one would ever be made – and housed in Bespoke walnut and white oak cabinet with engraved titanium plate. This new format, Ionic Original, is the lobotomized brainchild of producer T Bone Burnett, Dylan’s second guitarist in the 1970s and later the man who helmed O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack among many other commendable works. He hails the format as the “pinnacle of recorded audio” in terms of audio fidelity. On one level, it’s pure grunt, akin to the owner of a hi-fi shop trying to flog you gold-plated cables, even though it offers no sonic improvement over copper wire. Part of me thinks that if Burnett can con the millionaires out of their wealth, more power to him. No doubt there will be further releases in the series and maybe it will help fund some music projects that would not have happened otherwise. But at a time when so many musicians are struggling to make a living, and when wealth is increasingly unevenly distributed across the board, it feels insulting. It’s also the absurd pinnacle of vinyl fetishism. The vinyl market has exploded again in the past 20 years as the intangible nature of digital music has left people yearning for something to hold onto. Labels like Jack White’s Third Man Records and reissue specialists Numero Group have been making increasingly lavish box sets and impressive releases – and I crave them as much as any record lover. (My plush reissue of First Step Beyond by Satanic ’70s rockers Medusa? I’ve literally rubbed it in my face.) This market has helped support artists, labels and labels, but high prices (good luck finding a new release for less than £20) mean they are now largely the property of the more economical or determined fans: I don’t feel like I can I can’t afford vinyl anymore and I’ve stopped buying it. The Ionic Original format is the grotesque extreme of this malaise and which, with its high-profile financial success, deepens it. Even more seriously, the elitist effort goes against the very spirit of popular music. The cheapness and playability of pop – which, ignoring its own economic inequities for now, streaming takes on a frankly glorious scale – is what makes it such a defining cultural medium. To re-record one of the greatest songs in history and have only one person listen to it is a horrible inversion of the very concept of “popular”. Burnett may be trying to show respect for an important cultural artifact by framing it as an objet d’art, but when he sells it through Christie’s he uses the corrupt value system of the art market, where the monetary value of an object is often what gives it away. which means to its buyer. And a song is not an artifact: it blows in the wind. To trap it in a single white oak box – the same hoarding instinct that has destabilized so much culture over the years – dishonors the music itself. Wu-Tang Clan did something similar with their 2015 album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, a single copy of which was sold to pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli for $2 million and later sold for $4 million to an NFT group after Shkreli was convicted for fraud and had to pay off his debts. This was a gross spectacle in its own way, but the crucial difference was that no one had heard the album before. The concept of an album felt part of the tradition of a group with its own mythology. Blowin’ in the Wind, however, is a song about humanity itself: its cruelty, its potential, its terribly short lifespan. Yes, we can all keep listening to the original whenever we want. But to package this new interpretation as the object of a millionaire’s fetish is a shame – or, in the most generous interpretation, reinforces the song’s point about how doomed to inequality we really are.
