Back before you could steal music from the internet, you actually had to go to the effort to drive all of the way into town to shoplift it from a store. And if you were into vinyl, it was a bitch to get that shit under your shirt without anyone noticing.
Oh, record stores, how I miss your once, near ubiquity.
Who can forget the joy and fidelity of 8-track tapes and cassette singles? The overwhelming funk of the record store employees’ b.o. … not to mention their elitist b.s.? Or, wait: talk about nostalgia! Paying too much for re-releases of stuff you already own every time they update the medium!
Almost all of the stores I grew up worshiping (or working for!) the record industry’s rotten system are gone: The Finest by the CSU campus, ABCD’s, Rocky Mountain Records and Tapes, that crappy little store across from Rocky Mountain Records and Tapes that had the ever-angry guy running it, Hastings in the Foothills Fashion Mall, The Finest in Greeley (ugh, Greeley – your stockyards are in my nostrils, still) Wax Trax on the the hill in Boulder – hell, *all* the record stores on the hill in Boulder, or anywhere in Boulder from what I can tell …
But hey, they’re not *all* gone. Wax Trax and Twist and Shout appear to still be going in Denver, though it looks like Dave’s (the record nazi!) is gone. The Audio Alternative in Fort Collins likely still carries a pretty eclectic selection of stuff the other record stores never would have stocked, anyway – and that’s just my old stomping ground in Colorado; record stores are not dead, they just smell funny!
That’s right, they’re still out there. I’ve seen ’em in Seattle, I’ve seen ’em in Portland, I’ve seen ’em in New York, and Boston. There’s a record store right down the peninsula here in Port Townsend that’s still kicking. I’ll bet even Cleveland has a record store, by gum, and where else to better pull off your hipster-doofus act than a record store?
So get up off your platform shoes, slip those gawd-awful, ipod earplugs owtcher goggle-eyed noggin, peel your potato-shaped butt outta that polyvinyl chair, and make haste to the nearest record store. Poke around. Take some guff from the owner. Revel in the fact that buying used cd’s and records is an awful lot like ripping off the artist, just like at home on the internet, but NOW you get to actually hold something in your stinky, little hand when you’re done. Best of all, it will actually *sound* like it was intended to, unlike those withered, flat, tinny, and pathetic mp3’s that you’ve become so accustomed to abusing you ears with. Eeecccchhhhh!
If you like music, like finding new music, like talking to complete strangers with bad teeth and greasy hair about music, if you enjoy spending the mad money that’s been burning a hole in your helpless, little, materialistic American pocket (and you *know* you do) then do your part: go support your local wax-house and help preserve a part of America that should be near and dear to every true-blue, music lover’s heart: the local record store.
Hotcha.
