My husband and I both enjoy a really broad range of musical genres. As such, I’ve often wondered — how will our kids find a way to fulfill the role of the rebellious teenager at our house when we as parents seem to appreciate most loud and raucous material? I thought maybe the kids would turn to rap — but then MCYogi honed my appreciation for it. Country? I hate to admit it, but both the hubby and I have found certain veins of alt-country that we allow on the i-pod too. Our poor children — there’s nowhere for them to turn to for shock or rebelliousness.
Brandon – our man-child – is not swayed by what’s popular or what his friends are listening to. As he puts it, “You’ve gotta have a certain base of knowledge if you want to be able to comment about music with any level of self-respect. One of my friends made fun of Queen, and didn’t even know their music. C’mon — how can anyone go through life respectfully without knowing Bohemian Rhapsody?” Brandon’s favorites aren’t on my personal top 10 list, but I admire his process of choice — he’s earned the right to know what he likes and why. He always has good song suggestions for my yoga playlists.
For Brandon’s sixteenth birthday, I pulled him out of church for the day and we headed through the tunnel to Berkeley so I could take him to a proper music store. After all, I-tunes is amazing in it’s own right, but there’s nothing that quite encapsulates the charm of the music world as a full-fledged, old-fashioned, tangible music store. Enter Rasputin Music on Telegraph Avenue — home of 3 stories of CD’s, DVD’s and old-school vinyl. New, used, rare editions — you name it, it’s here. We meandered around, admiring the vintage vinyl album cover art, gawking over the price of the Rolling Stones special edition LP set, and finally settling on the third floor for him to sort through his favorite artists in the electronic music section. We sorted through stacks and stacks of music and I made his day by purchasing him a documentary, Justice: A Cross The Universe.
We were so satisfied with the glory that is Rasputin Music that we decided to save Aomeba Records for our next trip, but admired the store art as we walked by. We both love graffiti art, graphic art, and satirical humor and Telegraph Avenue kept us jumping from one piece of eye candy to another. We spent good quality time in Reprint Mint sorting through potential wall art for his room, and lingered for the good part of an hour in the basement of T-shirt Orgy, appreciating ironic humor and planning our Back to School shopping trip. We passed by Smart Alec’s Intelligent Fast Food restaurant on the way to our car, and ended our adventure with typical Brandon humor, “I want to go order and be a smart alec, at Smart Alec’s. They’re asking for it.” he said. “Well, duh – I of course want those fries to go. . ..”
Love this :) It makes me miss Berkeley, stop that!
That’s a great way to celebrate a beautiful Sunday morning!
Cool. I frequent Amoeba Records in Hollywood a couple times per year. It always makes me simultaneously happy and sad.
Why sad?
“Sad” because it represents a bygone era. I used to work in a record store in high school, and I spent hours every week at my favorite record stores throughout the 80s and 90s searching for treasure. Now I can find everything online for a fraction of the price, so I can’t get passed the idea that the actual “hard copy” is essentially worthless plastic.
The ultimate proof of of this is my collection of over 200 laser discs (a precursor to the DVD) that I’ve held onto since the early 90s, partly for nostalgic reasons, but mostly as a reminder of the ephemerality of format. I paid $40 – $80 for most of those discs, and now they are essentially worthless. I wouldn’t even watch them if my laser disc player worked, because DVD, and Blu Ray, is so superior. Amoeba offered to buy them for $1 per disc. They sell them not for the disc inside, but for the disc covers (same size as album covers), which cinephiles like to mount on their walls. And I still have over 1,000 CDs at home, most of which have been transferred to my ipod or laptop, so the actually CDs rarely get played and take up a lot of space.
So visits to Amoeba feel like shadow dances with my younger self, making me both happy and melancholy. And even if I found something really cool, I know I could probably find it online when I get home.
This makes me think of my dad’s extensive vinyl collection. All those times we spent combing through garage sales and record stores for rare original cast recordings of various musicals (my dad is not very rockin’, but he passed on his collector personality and passion for music), the occasional trips to Chicago to go to Rose Records (huge, great store — now gone).
Our 1,000+ CD collection has been in storage in America for the past five years. I try not to be overly sentimental about changing technology. With each change, something is gained — quality, accessability etc. — but it is hard not to feel that something experiential is being lost that can’t really be replaced — hanging out with other music nerds, digging up treasures, pretending to be sophisticated (how do teenagers do that these days?). I totally get the happy and the melancholy.
Matt, you’ve described perfectly why I wanted to take out and get his hands on something real. There’s something very nostalgic and community-oriented about digging through stacks of records, discs, etc.
You mean you took him to church for the day.
: – )
Laurie, we have similar conversations about how our children can possibly rebel against us musically. Maybe if they like Toby Keithesque country or really commercial Hip hop? Even then I would kind of respect the FU to their parents.
The photos make me really nostalgic. I spent a good part of my youth haunting independent record stores (most of which are now closed).