June 1999 ear candy by Ben Auburn |
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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. . . .
in the junk drawer:
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