OPINION Blur play at one of Rough Trade’s popular instore gigs
HAMISH BROWN As Record Store Day 2013 approaches, is every local ‘indie’ shop really worth saving? Shouldn’t we be celebrating something more than nostalgia and objects?
O n the face of it, the annual Record Store Day is still a bizarre idea. For one day a year, we’re all encouraged to celebrate the continued existence of small shops selling objects made of plastic and card, the primary function of which was once as a delivery medium for music, but that also developed a curious secondary quality as collectables in their own right.
These days, a world of potentially life-changing music is available everywhere. Why should we care for these remnants of a precarious and quickly-receding industry any more than for Yellow Pages, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Blockbuster and other models outpaced by technology? The world changed, the way we listen to music changed with it, but most record shops didn’t. On the surface, the sentiments behind Record Store Day might seem similar to other Facebook campaigns championing a worthy-but-failing enterprise. Certainly, if we go by documentaries such as Sound it Out, set in the last record shop on Teesside, such locations are now frequented by a freak show of ‘life’s outsiders’. These places are doing something admirable against the odds and deserving of your support, or perhaps they’re just quaint.
Similarly, the notion of record shops being the last bastion of the ‘indie’ ethos, that are in some sense ‘sticking it to the man’ by their very existence, discredits them as offering little more than nostalgia. Tellingly, few of the i gures waxing lyrical in 2012’s Last Shop Standing, (Billy Bragg, Johnny Marr, Norman Cook) are under 50. In harsh, adapt-or-die economic terms, when the commodity being traded stops being scarce, outlets will
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Meanwhile, those with
close. Although, in this case, some struggle on haunted by embittered proprietors wishing it was still the 90s. imagination and tireless enthusiasm have found a way to redei ne themselves as something better than they ever were. With Glasgow’s Monorail Music, years of immersive engagement with music by Stephen McRobbie and his staff enable them to create a unique environment that exudes passion, where a record simply being granted rack space means it’s highly likely to be your next musical epiphany. Manchester’s Boomkat specialise lefti eld electronica, staying sustainable by operating from an ofi ce, while Rough Trade’s new music compilations are essential releases and their instore gigs often pack out.
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This new breed of record store acknowledges that music is more than nostalgia and blind commerce. They have evolved into a space that allows for the best stuff to be heard, celebrating not just recorded music but the whole culture. The commodity may no longer be scarce, but neither is it homogenous: ‘Good music, and the other kind’ as Duke Ellington said. And there’s a place for discovering quality sounds using methods more substantial than Hype Machine, Amazon’s algorithm and the charts. This is where today’s record stores really have a role to play. As Tony Wadsworth, ex- CEO of EMI puts it in Last Shop Standing: ‘People actually do want somewhere they can go and i nd something they didn’t even know they wanted.’
Hamish Brown is a journalist, musician and The List’s web editor. Record Store Day is on Sat 20 Apr. See preview, page 73.
‘Some outlets struggle on wishing it was still the 90s’