Posted on 06/01/2011 12:25:28 PM PDT by GSWarrior
Brendan Toller’s documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store (2010) brings a good deal of personality and attitude (in the best sense) to the story of the demise of the independent record store, though it might just as well tell the story of the demise of the independent video or book store, all of which are victims of the same forces: box store encroachment followed by on-line revolution, all feeding the bottom lines of large corporations that don’t particularly give a damn about records, or movies, or books. The restaurant business has been similarly decimated. Applebee’s anyone?
I am a fierce advocate of free-market capitalism, and yet I have to agree with Toller that something has gone wrong when Wal-Mart sells 20% of all albums and those albums are largely the work of corporate mannequins like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. My mid-sized Southern college town has one remaining used record store and one remaining used book store. Our last independent video store closed in December, and our Borders – which drove out our independent book and record stores – recently got a dose of its own medicine and closed amid a blaze of luridly florescent signage of the kind you associate with particularly tacky used car lots.
I’ll have to explain to my young daughter how likeminded people used to gather – in the flesh – to mingle, swap notions and preferences, and listen to whatever was on the turntable. I will have to recreate the lost world of my youth, and tell how I roamed the second-hand record stores of Boston and Cambridge, spending hours in grungy mouse-holes like Mystery Train (named in honor of the Elvis tune), and how I timidly put my fourteen-year-old inquiries to the superior wisdom of pierced twenty-four-year-olds, who had, in fact, heard everything and evolved a real critical acumen. Between 1988 and 1992, I spent many procrastinative late afternoons at Cutler’s in New Haven (still there!). I once asked the sagacious manager about Moby Grape’s first album, about which I’d read in The Rolling Stone Record Guide (before it annoyingly became the “album guide”). He said that the record was out of print but that he had a copy (of course) and that he’d make me a tape. My tape was waiting for me the next day, as promised. You don’t get that kind of service – that degree or any degree of giving a damn – at Wal-Mart.
I will have to convey to my daughter what an elegant physical object the long-playing vinyl record was: how heavy as it balanced on the fingertips, how mysteriously engraved, hypnotic in its rotation, poignantly delicate and prone to time’s different kind of engraving.
Explain also how eye-catching and sometimes beautiful album art was and how much the art mattered. Certain album covers were indelible objects of fascination. Blue Note’s myriad masterpieces of cover design (see here) seemed to inscribe a whole worldview of avant-gardism and cool, a kind of visual code for high modernism in its African-American dimension. On more sober and mature reflection, I realize that Blue Note created one of the supreme caches of modern American design. I adored the Warhol banana on the first Velvet Underground album (1967) and the Mapplethorpe portrait on Patti Smith’s Horses (1976). It’s reasonable to surmise that album art, like comic books, filled a gaping visual void in middle-class American life and inspired countless young people to begin to think about the world in visual terms.
I will also have to explain that technology is not necessarily progressive and that the long-playing record actually sounded better.
I will have to explain, finally, that each record somehow told the story of its own history. In I Need That Record, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s guitarist, beautifully elegizes the LP as an artifact in this sense:
"I’m a fan of the download. I like to hit enter and have the song appear on my iTunes within seconds, but there’s something about holding the artifact, about feeling it in your hand. It reveals a lot about the moment in time that the record was made. An abstract song could come from anywhere, but if you see something in a twelve-inch vinyl LP, with the cover art, or you hear the scratch in the 78, you get a sense of time and place that is, for me, irreplaceable."
When my daughter asks what happened to record companies and record stores and to the records themselves, I will have to answer honestly, “I’m not really sure.” Communism is a potential analogy: decades of self-imposed misery, the illogic of which was demonstrated by the almost instantaneous evaporation and repudiation of the offending system. Does capitalism have phases of communistic heartlessness and aimlessness and self-destruction? Perhaps we too will eventually exclaim, “Good lord, what are we doing to ourselves,” and our equivalent of the Berlin Wall will suddenly become the pile of rubble it was, in actuality, all along.
Fred Goodman’s classic The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce is a good place to begin an inquiry into what the hell has gone wrong (1998). I Need That Record updates the story.
Digital media have partially loosened the bottleneck created by the record companies, but on-line existence is comparatively sterile and un-educational in the broadest life sense. It’s great to watch, say, Wanda Jackson or Hound Dog Taylor on YouTube (here and here), but there’s no getting around the fact that you remain at your desk, not having had to foray into the world of sights and sounds and chance encounters. And, in any case, where are today’s Wanda Jacksons? Where are the A&R men and independent record store owners working on behalf of the next Wanda Jackson, not because they want a spread in the Hamptons, but because they instinctively want to live in a world that’s a little more spirited?
I assume that you mean independent music, and the answer's no. There was an independent record store not far from my house that I would go to from time to time, but I found that they were overpriced and frequented mostly by stoners (it was also a head shop), so it wasn't a place that I spent a lot of time. I'd drop in from time to time to find an import or other record that I couldn't find elsewhere, but that's all. Today, though, my musical tastes have changed quite dramatically, primarily due to the easy availability of music on the Internet and XM (which, sadly, I found far superior to Sirius). I agree that it's easier, but I disagree that there is less good stuff. I listen to a pretty small niche of music, and I find that there is tons of great stuff being put out these days.
I'm not sure that I agree, and I don't think that there is much of a difference. The people that play the records behind the counter at a record store pick whatever grabs their fancy that day, same as the guy that runs Nine Bullets. It's a person playing music that interests them.
But hey, I've never really been into that scene, and maybe that's me. During college, I worked as a deejay at a radio station that played independent music. A few of the other folks turned me on to some interesting stuff that I liked for a bit, but I've just not ever been impressed when people say, "here, listen to this."
If you’re patient, you can find good new music on the web, but it requires lots and lots of patience. I used to go through hundreds of recordings on garageband.com and other now defunct sites where bands uploaded their tracks, and after spending hours listening I’d find a dozen or two gems which I then burned onto CDs to give to friends. That’s how I discovered Drive By Truckers a good several years ago.
I did this again recently on epitonic.com. (I don’t know any other sites like it, although this page which may or may not be up to date lists some: http://www.redferret.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php) My method, if you can call it that, is to listen to the first 15-30 seconds of the track, sometimes even less, to see if it grabs me and go from there.
There are tons and tons of hard noise rock and whiny singer songwriter stuff out there, but you can find a few original performers.
That one might be interesting. In my early adulthood I worked next to what was at the time Tucson’s best used music store, and I was still living with mom so I had no where else to put my money. I always remember Jeff, who looked just like Bob Fripp on the cover of Red and was big into prog rock (so the look was at least partly deliberate), we could chat away the hours. When you hit the same place over and over the clerks get a handle on your larger musical taste, when they see you buying Black Sabbath one week, Tull the next, Neil Young after that and then Butthole Surfers today they know more about your musical taste than the guy at WalMart who didn’t work there last week and probably won’t be there next. These are the guys that can say “I know you don’t like country but you do like punk, let me put some Johnny Cash on for you, don’t think of it as country, it’s really pre-plugged in instruments punk” (roughly a conversation I actually had with a guy at PDQ, and I still listen to Johnny today).
To which I would add “Get out and go see some live music.”
We’re going to a house concert next Saturday.
http://www.myspace.com/bowmanhouseconcerts
“LPs are the only type of recorded music that dont require electricity to listen to.”
Oh, okay.
“The indie shops represented a community, a curated pick of quality material that wasn’t initially promoted in the mainstream”
This is what boutiquers would like to believe, I suppose. But I never found it to be so. Every specialty store I’ve ever been to had a lot of dross to search through for the occasional diamond. I could always listen to the “community” that owned and/or frequented them, but less than an elite minority of quality curators, they seemed to me just another subset with its particular tastes.
The mainstream is inherently unfair, and I very well realize that for every Beatles and Stones there are a hundred bands who could have been as or nearly as good given the chance. Shakespeare is not the greatest English poet of all time; he’s the best of the most famous English poets. There is all sort of quality out there to be experienced of which most people will never be aware. Good for you if you can find trustworthy guides.
However, if I substitute music nerds’ bands X, Y, and Z, for Joe Lunchbox’s A, B, and C, do I really gain that much? Just how trustworthy are these specialty merchants? Are they like what we know as cultists, who merely replace the mainstream with an arbitrarily selected alternative mainstream? Yes, probably.
But that’s not really the point. I’m fine with something other than what happens to be advertised and stocked on shelves determining my taste. I’m fine with trusting a filter of connoisseurs, and a community therefrom arising. I only ask, does it have to be in a store? Can’t I hone my taste on experts and family, friends, acquantances, etc. and then go out and buy what I need? Yes.
“There were artists with regional popularity, or hometown support now.”
I don’t see as how this has disappeared with the rise of the internet.
I have to purchase the music I like online. It’s almost the only place where I can find what I like. The artists that I prefer are not very well known in most circles.
“However, if I substitute music nerds’ bands X, Y, and Z, for Joe Lunchbox’s A, B, and C, do I really gain that much?”
It depends. There’s certainly another couple levels of fluff that’s all hype and flavor of the month hyping, but by and large, the people staffed at indie stores are well versed and eclectic, even if the idea of a tastemaker doesn’t impress you. There is a social element to exposing creative work, and as we know, relying on the internet has about as many benefits as it does detractors.
“I don’t see as how this has disappeared with the rise of the internet.”
It just has. That’s a fact. Authors mainly write books for other authors, and their friends. Bands burn out their home audiences, and can’t support themselves on touring unless they get licensing deals, or invited to big festivals. Massively popular artists like Jay-Z, U2, REM, and Madonna are signing 360 deals. Someone like Prince doesn’t even have a label right now. There are only about 8 Hollywood actors who can guarantee a film gets financed now. That’s a new reality within the last 5 years, and the market realities trickle down. Barnes and Noble refreshes it’s shelves monthly and return what doesn’t sell for a credit. The mom and pops often keep a product on the shelves until it sells. An internet database is an endless flood of buried content.
“People have access to unlimited information on the internet. They are still idiots when it comes to politics, history, economics, science, and music.”
Well, yeah. But commerce isn’t about refining taste; it’s about getting what you want most efficiently. According to that standard, the web beats specialty shops hands down. You may argue that specialty shops helped educate taste and raise people above the level of idiots. They did. But as I’ve been saying, commercial enterprises, however refined and rarified, are poor substitutes for actual community.
It’s not the Athenian agora at your local Alternative Record Store. At best its nerds lording over their fiefdoms.
“But wandering in a vast wasteland (or the warehouse at the Smithsonian) doesn’t mean that you will automatically gravitate to what you are looking for.”
No, but how about we talk about these things with our actual friends, family, etc.? How about if we form friends and mentors on the basis of what consumer goods we have in common these become actual friend/mentorships instead of convenient acquantancships which pop into use only when we cross the threshold of the store entrance? How about we use basic things like author’s own bibliographies and recommended reading lists to guide our readership, for instance? The back pages of our favorite books are no wastelands.
“Being told that some obscure cut is “good” may not sound that way if you haven’t heard “this” or grown up in that environment.”
I agree in that music is something to be heard with other people. Much morseso than it was meant to be experienced alone, at least. But why does said environment have to be in a store? Stores are primarily for buying. Even the ones that you hang out in regularly for hours on end. You could just as easily be hanging out elsewhere listening to the same thing with real friends, acquantances, and friendly strangers, especially in the age of the internet. I realize in the past you might have had to go to the local record shop to hear that sort of thing, but no longer.
“The signal to noise ratio of people hyping things has become higher than ever”
Yes, absolutely. But I’ve never been on board with the sort of people who see the alternative as a true alternative to the mainstream. To me it’s always seemed but a smaller mainstream. A consensus for people who don’t necessarily like the larger consensus. Give me the unlimited wasteland of easily accessable information for me to shoot through like a rocket-car on the salt flats any day.
“And now we have hipsters for food called ‘foodies’”
I once read that a gentlemen never discusses food, and I think it’s a noble point.
“No one would put up with their friend telling them EVERY meal what they had for breakfast, lunch and dinner the day before. On line, they think we all give a damn.”
For clarity’s sake, let me state emphatically that I do not see internet communities as substitutes for commercial communities, let alone good, old-fashioned regular communities. The internet is not a vast wasteland, it is a cesspool. That is, if you’re looking for contact with other humans. If you’re looking for a tool to help you buy things, on the other hand, it is unbeatable.
“if you want to BUY something rather than just copy it, you still have to find a vendor”
LEt me not speak for music, which is not my main area of interest anyway. So far as books go, the internet has opened up a world of easy perusal and purchase impossible in the popular local used bookstore in the college town I used to live.
“There is a social element to exposing creative work, and as we know”
Yes, I do know. I suppose my main point is that the specialty shop is a soggy compromise between the sort of society one finds in noncommercial life—you know, among family, friends, colleagues, fellow club and organization members, fellow churchgoers, etc.—and the efficiency of the internet. It shortchanges you on both counts.
“Bands burn out their home audiences, and can’t support themselves on touring unless they get licensing deals, or invited to big festivals”
Was this not the case back in the day?
“The problem with surfing he web as a way to find music, books or movies is on the web you find what you’re looking for, but rarely anything else.”
I don’t at all agree with this, but I’ll stipulate that, yes, you pick up less along the way than you would had your taste been informed by connoisseurship at the local record or used book store. My point, though, again, is that the internet is merely a tool of efficient commerce, and as such is vastly superior to specialty shops. If you’re looking to inform your taste, there are bibliographies and liner notes and so forth, but more important actual human beings out in the world that don’t have to be met at the point of purchase. Allow them to influence you.
“The web creates tunnel vision where the indie stores create buffets.”
Here is where your argument completely breaks down for me. Before this point I might take your word for it that the sort of community found in record stores is legitimate enough, and in any case vastly superior to online ones. But never can I ignore the fact that’s as plane as the nose on their faces. Alternative record shops and used book stores do not contain all the colors of the rainbow. Those people are pretty narrow-minded on their own, as well parodied in the movie “High Fidelity.”
There’s a reason “nerd” has a bad connotation. That sort of connoisseurship tends toward snobbism and obscurity. You’ll never find people more standardize than in cult communities.
More than that, though, my point all along has been that communities based on commerce are poor substitutes for traditional ones. That is, granting that trade has influenced society across the millenia in countless ways, but that commercial society in the age of the Athenian agora (which I take to be the conventional apex of the link between commerce and high culture) and the age of the head shop are vastly different.
If the day comes when college towns don't have at least one independent book and at least one independent music store, then things really have gone to hell.
“You could walk into a record store and hear anything, or be recommended anything”
Really? That seems like an outlandish claim. Personally, I’ve found them to be populated and operated by a severly limited array of types. You have hippies on one extreme and metal-heads on another, but they don’t seem all that different to me. Both are merely a different variety of nerd. And I may be stereotyping, but that’s what I find in those places. Various little nerd empires represented: from folk to headbanging to comic books to horror to anime even to something I respect, like classical.
It’s all very different yet the same. Tiny fiefdoms of alternative mainstreams.
“If the day comes when college towns don’t have at least one independent book and at least one independent music store, then things really have gone to hell.”
Such judgements are based on pure prejudice, in my opinion. It will never touch the general population no matter how open and easy is it to collect and experience all the goods in the world. But what is replacing the independent book and music stores can easily make for better listened and read consumers. I personally much prefer Amazon to the used bookstore I used to frequent in college. I can get more bang for my buck and much better find what I’m looking for.
“People have access to unlimited information on the internet. They are still idiots when it comes to politics, history, economics, science, and music”
By the way, this sounds suspiciously to me like the sort of arguments people have made against the printing press. If that invention never raised the heights of human achievement, certainly it raised the general level. That’s all it was ever supposed to do.
I don’t trust that cultural preservation is in better hands now than it was with men like Thomas Aquinas. Then again, specialty store operators and frequenters were no monks. We’re talking about freakin’ stores here, not monasteries, libraries, and museums.
In theory, we could all stay in our houses or apartments and order everything we want to be delivered to us. But that's not exactly living and experiencing the world.
There's something of value in old book and record stores and the community that they provide that I wouldn't want to see lost.
“In theory, we could all stay in our houses or apartments and order everything we want to be delivered to us. But that’s not exactly living and experiencing the world”
Considering what constitutes real-world physical shopping for most people, they might as well be Leibnizian monads. Which the internet only exacerbates, I admit. Which is exaclty why I encourage us to divorce the notions of society and community from commerce. Because the days of the Athenian agora and Renaissance fair are dead.
Hanging out at specialty shops is no substitute. It replaces self-interested cliques for the genuine interaction of other platforms (family, friends, colleagues, teams, clubs, churches, etc.). On the other hand, as I’ve been arguing, it lacks economic efficiency. So it loses on both fronts.
“There’s something of value in old book and record stores and the community that they provide that I wouldn’t want to see lost.”
Let me not overstate my case. There surely was value, infinitely moreso than you find on blogs, message boards, and chatrooms. But not any more than, say, my lunch table in Junior High. I don’t miss that community, by the way, and wouldn’t go back for all the gold in Peru.
You need to find better record stores. The one I used to work next to, PDQ, tended to have “one of each”, a metal head, a punker, a hippie, a prog nerd, country, you name it depending on who was entrusted with the turn table that day there was no limit to what you could hear. There’s nothing with nerds, everybody is a nerd about something.
Sorry but you’re just plain wrong, pretty much across the board. Or maybe you just had crappy stores to chose from. Here’s the #1 used place Tucsonans get to chose from: http://www.bookmans.com/ , if you can’t find all the colors of the rainbow there it’s because you’ve deliberately closed your eyes.
Liner notes only tell you more about THAT music, again the tunnel vision. You’re not going to meet actual human beings playing tunnel vision on the web.
And the reason “nerd” has a bad connotation is some people just can’t handle not being the smartest person in the room.
Nobody is saying anything about commerce based communities replacing “traditional” communities. That’s your own strawman. And nobody is talking about headshops either. You do a lot of strawman erecting, a lot of silly dismissing, and not much listening. Which goes a long way to explain why your experience in indie shops is so negative. And it’s all you, not the shops. You don’t want to listen to other people. Which is your prerogative, but let’s not pretend it’s the other people’s fault. You want to be the smartest guy in the room and you’ve found the easiest way to guarantee that is by being the only guy in the room.
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