June 1999
s m u g
ear candy
by Ben Auburn

Hip Replacement

More than a treasured club, more than in front of the finest stereo, the music critic's favorite place in the world, is the used record store. Partly because music critics are cheap. The prospect of getting a disc for half of retail or less is nothing to sneer at. But mostly it's because of the ungodly feeling of potential you get just by walking in. Somewhere, in there, is the one thing you were looking for -- even if you didn't know you were looking for it until you found it.

The real crap shoot is usually away from the wall racks, where browsing is linear and easy, thrown in the middle of the store, in the crappiest, oldest crates: the clearance bin.

Make no mistake, the clearance bin is not for the faint of heart. It's made up almost entirely out of the dreck that no one would buy, things rotting away in the full-price racks for months, maybe even years. From four dollars (an expensive clearance item, and it better be good) to under a buck, the detritus of detritus sits, waiting the most and least discerning. Waiting for you.

The act of looking through the clearance bin is, whether the browser knows it or not, an act of supreme hubris. Or at least chutzpah. There's something vaguely snotty about shopping for used music at all -- by doing so, you're presuming to have a sharper eye than the people who came before you. Think about it -- when you pick up that copy of the first Meat Puppets album for six bucks, not only are you psyched to have found a cheap buy, you silently celebrate the idiocy of the person who would sell such a thing. Used record shopping is, in a way, passively predatory capitalism.

The clearance bin, then, is this idea boiled down to its essence. Not only are you presuming to be able to identify that which someone before you has (foolishly) rejected -- you believe that you can spot the diamond in the rough that has been gone over thousands of times before you. Or maybe it's something so obscure (you tell yourself) that not even the Incredibly Hip staff of the Incredibly Hip record store could ID it as worthy of the regular racks. If you don't find anything worthy of joining your collection, at least you have the opportunity to guffaw at reams of crap someone actually tried to listen to. Better yet, just the act of purchasing something from the clearance bin -- selecting that which no one else would select -- marks you as hipper than hip.

Or, at least, that's the idea. In practice, it may not work that way -- just last week I got stuck with five bucks worth of tepid Boston born guitar rock that was Supposed To Be Good, or so I'd heard in my super-secret rock critic channels. [They do exist, you know: e-mail ben@smug.com for the passwords.] Out of five people in the store, though, only two of us were brave enough -- were cool enough -- to try our luck at the clearance bin. I left five bucks poorer but even more convinced of my musical self-worth. That is, until I got the discs into my cd player. . . .


ben@smug.com

in the junk drawer:

featurecar
net
worth
chair
ac/dcgun
smoking
jacket
barcode
ear
candy
pie
feed
hollywood
lock
target
audience
scissors
back
issues
dice
compulsionvise
posedowncheese
the
biswick
files
toothbrush
mystery
date
wheelbarrow
and such
and such
hat
blabfan
kissing
booth
martini






     
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