I Really Miss Record Stores (And Venues, and CU Records)

Other Music is a documentary about a closed-down record store, one which launched the careers of so many artists who would inspire my high school sadboi self to start recording music. Those bands – Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, The National – are given plenty of time to speak on their history at Other Music, and the documentary sings the enthusiasm of its past employees. It’s a nostalgic film about a vanished Lower East Side landmark, made only sadder by the collective nostalgia we have for concerts and physical spaces. But Other Music did not close during the pandemic. The store closed in 2016 (see: the Obama administration), and the documentary about it has gone through a crowdsourcing campaign and various different soft releases before finally coming out, online, in 2020. So make no mistake, this is not a Covid story. There’s a deeper, more sobering irony to this documentary that says less about the pandemic than it does about our streaming habits: a documentary mourning the loss of physical spaces could only find a home online, even before the pandemic. What does that say about the state of music spaces to come?

Watching Other Music on Amazon Prime can get uncomfortable – you kind of feel like you’re part of the problem, eating the store alive in real time. It’s a weird combination of mourning and guilt, but despite these mixed emotions I am extremely grateful this film got made. My musical hero from high school, Avey Tare, is featured extensively in interviews about the time he spent working at the store. Yo La Tengo, arguably the best band in history, makes an appearance. You even get a live set from Neutral Milk Hotel! If that’s not the indie dream, I don’t know what is.

Excitingly, Other Music is also a time capsule of what was a truly vibrant, inclusive, and historical community space, built around exploring and promoting new genres of music to anyone who’d listen. Yes, vinyl collecting is a bougie hobby these days (perhaps it’s always been), but watching Other Music I think about all the times I went to the record store as a 15-year-old, just to eavesdrop on the people working there. I thought I was hot shit (I was the only kid at my high school who listened to Sonic Youth, look at me!), but overhearing the clerk talk with customers about Grouper, Cursillistas, and Akron/Family humbled me a lot. On the bus ride home, I’d look up these musicians, and their music would stick with me obsessively for weeks.

The albums I discovered from that period are still saved on my Spotify, and going back to them now fills me with an immense appreciation for the privilege I had, accessing this community space and, importantly, not being kicked out for having no money. From encountering so many people who knew so much more than me, I grew immensely as a musician and a music fan. Everyone I know has someone in their life who “knows way more about music than anyone else,” but what happens when there is nowhere for these people to congregate? Sure, you could talk with people on a subreddit. You could subscribe to Fantano on YouTube. But even for an introvert like myself, musical discovery is nothing without a tangible community. The past two years at CU Records have highlighted that for me. I’ve recorded and jammed with my friends there, I’ve gotten to work with genuinely some of the weirdest and most interesting people I’ve ever met, I’ve recorded musicians from Postcrypt Coffeehouse, and, just like the record store of my teenage years, I’ve felt CU Records challenge as an artist and music lover.

Like the memory of Other Music, the memory of CU Records is being stored online, if only for the time being. But we are lucky that it can and will re-open. CU Records isn’t an expensive hobby, and neither are the countless free (or near-free) spaces around New York City that form a quiet but very real social fabric of artists. The last concert I went to pre-Covid was at the Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn. Tickets were suggested donations of something like $5, and my friend and I (like total idiots, in hindsight) only stayed for the first two sets. But that was enough time to thank musicians who played, who were just as kind as they were talented. The next day I saw an Instagram video from one of my favorite musicians in the city – someone whom I’ve been admiring from afar since high school – and his video was of that concert! INSANE! You could see my elbow in the shot!!

Similarly, I would hear bands practicing before my slot at CU Records, and when they’d walk out of the door I’d recognize them from a party the week before. How touching – who would have guessed that the weed we shared outside of EC would lead to this very moment? It’s not much for friendship, but it certainly isn’t nothing. If this is the bare minimum for artist encounters we could have post-Covid (which it better be), I’m down! Because moments like this only trace the outline of a bigger network of artists you don’t appreciate until they’re gone. Or, at least, until they’re scattered throughout the globe, or sheltered in their apartments. I don’t really have a moral for this. You should definitely watch the Other Music documentary. It’s great, especially if you like indie music from the 2000s. If you hate indie music from the 2000s, you’ll probably still really like it but it might not hit as hard.

Ethan Abelar