Happy Record Store Day. I know this is Record Store Day because I have been to the Internet. I have slept its lofts and burrowed its troll-filled caves. I have hiked its far-flung borders and lurked its noisy sex hideouts. I shake hands with the devil at the social media water coolers and cringe through the mob’s infatuations with lies and prevarications.
I have witnessed the broken promise of digital liberation, deep in the circuitry of a military grade infrastructure, bent to the will of a few emotionally stagnant oligarchs, celebrating their cooption of humanity’s freedom. The illusions of choice. The cycles of addiction. Your algorithm: there are many like it but this one is mine.
I fall to my knees, my face white and blue in the rocket’s red glare of Orwell’s telescreen, mind mercifully empty. I invoke: By the spear of Odin (not a thing)… ok, by the Rented car of the downtown medical secretary (better) I beseech you, Internet, sell me something! An onanistic purge ensues, and for a quiet moment I rest, while in the white severanced room behind the curtain, a credit card with my name on it acquires a new entry in the ledger’s debit column.
At the same instant, in a warehouse conceived, financed and built upon the premise of a minimum wage and an economy predicated upon the exploitation of human resources, 180 grams of vinyl impressed with the unmatched sonic lightning of a 1970’s rock studio is retrieved from a vault where it was preserved for the day that the same music might be sold to the same person, for a third time.
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On this very special day (yup, Very), as real news gathering services continue to disappear to the screams of delight of twittering billionaires jumping up and down in a wonderfully energetic Mike Myers pantomime, Next Play will pose as a reasonable facsimile of a mainstream magazine and, in considering the merits of the album, invent a list of pros and cons for the enjoyment of you, its only reader.
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NEXT PLAY PRESENTS: ALBUMS, PROS AND CONS!
Pros: They’re records.
Cons: Everything else about them.
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I bought my first record when I was eleven (everything happened when I was 11) with an accumulation of weekly allowances, demonstrating an early and surprising and ultimately squandered aptitude for restraint. It was by The Beatles and it is called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. An auspicious beginning to a music library, some will say, with its remarkable achievements in recording, infamously compiled using only a four-track recorder. George Martin had the patience of a monk. Revisionists will postulate the counter-factual argument that Sgt. Pepper’s is an overrated, pretentious piece of shit, and what about Pet Sounds they say, as you search the bottom of your beer glass praying for an immediate refill. Experts will disagree and everyone else will, apparently, ignore them.
We have no more cultural touchstones, although an unnatural number of people in the Next Play orbit appear to have suffered through the third season of White Lotus together. The verb is not a criticism. Next Play offers the counter-factual postulation that suffering is in fact the point of Mike White’s elegant, exotic depravity. This tasteless tabloid will furthermore add its powerful, internet-fueled voice to the choruses of admiration, as strong as Lucy’s in the Sky with Diamonds, for Sam Rockwell’s elegant, exotic and really quite fucking unforgettable story of personal transformation, as avatar for the fugitive American middle-aged male, escaped from responsibility as so many have, in the subliminal heat and infinite wonder of Thailand, where every tomorrow is Saturday.
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I spent whole Saturday afternoons trolling the horizontal stacks of Sam the Record Man and A&A and Discus. If you wanted to own music you bought a record. That was the format. Then they (them) started selling eight-track cartridges, the JD Vance of formats, oh my god did I actually fucking buy this... Then there were cassettes, inaugurating early file sharing, magnetized on TDK and Maxell and BASF, sublimated onto High Fidelity’s mixtapes of sexual yearning and frustration and John Cusak’s open mouthed disbelief in his sacred and venerated role as the original record store clerk, presiding over a temple of cool with his merry band of pranksters.
At $7.99, records were a big-ticket item and I chose them after long internal discussions, deliberations that would one day morph into the endless mindfuckery that sent me into the moderated introspections of therapy. My mind was a needle skipping in place on a Pink Floyd scream.
I treated my records badly. Delightfully stoned, I tossed them to the floor to get the next hit of sonic satisfaction onto the turntable. Scratches ensued, imbuing the music I owned with analog hiccups that are now part of the source code for Gen X. We reflex at scratchy record sounds. They are aphrodisiac.
In my carelessness with vulnerable vinyl, I turned the tables on the material world. I freed myself from attachments to objects. It was Buddhism with zero discipline. I was very stupid.
It is 2006 and I am in the back yard of my Montreal row house apartment in Little Burgundy. I am selling off my possessions, including crates of albums. I put out the smoking joint as another welcome intruder enters the yard. They pick up and inspect a live album from Emerson, Lake and Palmer. They give me $5 for it. They must be very lonely. He won’t have a girlfriend playing this kind of music.
My neighbour Jacques is sorry to see me go. Who then will comfort him with sovereign beer? Not his wife, who is delightful and really hot but impatient with old men. Why are you leaving me, he beseeches.
I am moving to Toronto to live with my attorney. It’s a legal decision.
I sell all weekend and give the leftovers to Cheap Thrills, a temple of disaffected cool on Bishop St.
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It is 2025 and there are a few record stores in Toronto, like pyramids you visit to perform a simulacrum of history.
You can buy the same music you bought when you were eleven, now $29.99 at the bottom end of the pricing scale. The same nerds are still fingering through the magic. They will buy a beautiful music storage device called a record album, with its magnificent suggestive covers and small font lyrics and credits, the sublime physical.
They are engaging in an act of Joyful Rebellion. Placing the album onto the Technics and placing the needle at the outermost edge of the album’s universe, she says: this time is sacred. Giving her attention without the intercession of a screen. It is as beautiful a ritual as lighting a cigarette and probably more dangerous, time a carved spiral circling ever inward, drawing the needle into the centre, where everything ends and all is one, at the Atlantic logo.
I have been to the internet and I have been to the record store. The record store holds the promise of community and shared passions, and your local Jack Black, a jolly troll, still walking on sunshine.
CULTURAL TOUCHSTONES
· All hail Clem.
· And his fantastic drumming.
· God. Fear. Money. Meshell Ndegeocello’s Anthropological Mixtape.
· Now playing at Larry’s: Joel Plaskett! Canada much?
· The longer read from a real news gathering service. Gen X, paying for the pursuit of happiness.