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Wil Wheaton dropped this nugget on his blog yesterday:
… Sure, it’s great to have the convenience of buying and instantly downloading records and stuff, but the damn kids today who will grow up without ever setting foot in a record store or talking to a hardcore music geek who works there just don’t know what they’re missing.
And they’re missing a lot.
It really doesn’t get any simpler — or truer — than that. Believe me, I love the things the Internet affords us all. And you know what I mean: instant this, access to that, location independent blah blah blah.
But there’s something wonderful about spending time in the record store, mixing with the music and the people there in a tactile way that browsing the super-shitty iTunes just can’t reproduce.
As cool as Apple wants to make you feel about owning one of its pretty pretty products, the record store thing ain’t gonna happen while you’re sitting on your ass listening to 30 second snippets through shitty speakers.
No chance of strolling the aisles and flipping through the stacks and talking to the scruffy kid, who’s filing new arrivals, about what he likes better, THIS YEAR’S MODEL or LONDON CALLING. Or finding that you both dig bagpipes, klezmer, or John Denver… as much as you dig Johnny Rotten.
Maybe it’s just stupid romance for me, but the record store is where I learned to love Sonny Criss and Josh Bell and R.L. Burnside.
It’s also the place where I met each of the four men who stood up for me at my wedding… and the place where I met the woman I married that day.
(If you haven’t guessed already, I worked in a rec-a-sto once upon a time. For the better part of the 90s, I schlepped my ass to a stand alone shop for miserable pay and tons of promo CDs and comp tickets to just about every rock and roll show that blew through town.)
Unlike Wheaton, I’m not sure I miss my record store geek days… at least not from a consumer’s point of view. There’s so much out there and I don’t have the dough to discover one percent of what I used to know, and I’m not convinced — even if money wasn’t an object — that half of that stuff is worth discovering anyway.
What I share with Wheaton, in addition to lamenting the demise of the record shop and what that means, is the connection of music to significant parts of the past. It’s more visceral for me than movies are. More than books, too.
Maybe I don’t always remember the exact event connected to a song or record. Sometimes, yes. But I do remember the time and what it represented for me while I was in it.
Is it the same for you? What are some of the things you’ve really connected with like that? Drop a comment… let’s discuss.
Tags: itunes, music, wil wheaton
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Where do I start? I’ve met a lot of people who told me they never got into music until high school and it blows my mind. There was never a time in my life when I wasn’t surrounded with it, from Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Bach on my parents stereo to their Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and that first Beatles album that came in the house, followed by Simon and Garfunkle, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez — then hanging outside in Boston as a pretty little kid, we all had our crappy transistor radios tuned into the AM station, listening to Brandy, Elton John’s Crocodile Rock, Mo-Town. Then in Jr. High, I bought my first two albums: Maggie Mae and The Joker and I was a vinyl junkie from then on. Freshman year everyone was playing Frampton Comes Alive — then it was Zeppelin, The Who, Bob Seger, Journey, Iggy Pop, The Pretenders, Elvis Costello. Every AF assignment has it’s songs — I’d better stop now. Too many songs and places, so I guess I’m awfully old. But yes, music more than any other thing has defined my memories. Great post.
i envy you for your record stores
i’ve only been to those cd stores in malls that sell music cds and movies on dvd and vcd; the salespeople tend to follow customers around and stare at them while they browse. (i’m from the philippines, by the way.) it’s unnerving to say the least, even if they’re probably just discouraging shoplifting or something like that. so, i’ve never had any good experiences browsing for music in a store… music geeks in record stores, i’d love to meet one. 