I’m standing in the aisles of my neighborhood record store, Abraxas Wax, talking to a former student who was bitten with the vinyl bug just before he took a class with me last September. He is chronicling his latest haul with an all-too-familiar excitement. It’s the kind of reverie that only vinyl geeks understand, and the type of details that could be considered tedious to the casual listener — you know, reasonable human beings.
Over the last year, this former student’s collection has grown beyond hip-hop and classic rock. Seth from Abraxas has a gold touch when it comes to recommendations. He can size up someone’s tastes (in a non-judgmental way) and pull a stack of wax that not only feeds the passion but invites deeper digs…and buys. It’s what you want in a shop that deals in your vices, an affable, knowledgeable, no-pressure tastemaker.
Seth sets a tone that makes it easy for the neophyte to fall in love with vinyl. My student is a prime example, and while I’m usually super excited to hear about hauls and discoveries (especially from students), I was fairly distracted. Then there was a beat in the conversation, an awkward pause where an attentive, active listener’s voice belongs…
“...so yeah. Soul and funk. That’s where I’m heading…recommendations…?”
I find myself staring blankly at him for a moment, blink myself back into the conversation at the key word “recommendations”. It’s an invitation I don’t take lightly, even if I’m not always great off the cuff with them in a casual conversation. Giving someone advice on what to check out or listen to can be such a personal take. You want to make sure that you strike the right balance of their current tastes and put your self-interest on the back burner. This last part is crucial. Your recommendation is for them, not for you to flex your know-it-all-unheralded-keeper-of-the-flame nonsense.
Reflexively I respond, “You can’t go wrong with Stax. Or Memphis in general.” And silence. My former student is waiting for a more complete recommendation.
“RZA did this great compilation a few years back featuring the Stax catalog. These were songs and artists that he either sampled or inspired him as a musician.” Name-dropping Wu-Tang piqued his interest. It was a bridge between the familiar and a new stretch of highway; an on-ramp that my former student was eager to take.
Of course, the compilation I mentioned is way out of print, and I knew that before I even said it. So why blurt it out? Why drop this nugget in the young guy’s lap and then pull it away? I kind of felt like Lucy as I watched a Charlie Brown look cross my former student’s face.
“Oh…but Stax Records is something I should look for?” He motioned over to the Soul section and we spent a couple of minutes digging out Stax Records for him to consider: The Bar-Kays, Jean Knight, Isaac Hayes, Booker T & the MGs. Recommending Stax albums to an emerging soul fan is like recommending water to the thirsty and I gave him a short history of the sound and records to keep an eye out for; eventually he snapped a few pictures with his phone and thanked me for the advice.
RZA was on my mind way before this conversation, in part, due to a record store visit a few weeks back. Honestly, if anyone would’ve asked for a recommendation that day, beit soul, hip hop, indie folk music, or a favorite Chinese restaurant in town, I would have probably blurted out RZA, simply because I was obviously still processing this experience.
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The first question I ask whenever my wife and I are traveling to a new town always revolves around finding a local record store. Will there be time to pencil in a quick wander and look around? How far out of the way is the closest shop? What’s our budget? (This last one is important since Aubrie is reasonable enough to keep me tethered to reality. At this point in our relationship, she knows I don’t see her as the bad cop, even if I sometimes huff like a 5-year-old in a toy aisle.)
We found ourselves in southern Minnesota, and with some time to kill (Aubrie was running errands) I tracked down two record stores. The first one led me to an empty storefront that had been shuttered for a long time…It still amazes me that in the days of Google, Yelp, and social media a store can up and vanish.
The second shop was a few miles outside of town, nestled in a netherworld of endless strip malls threaded along a stretch of highway that had construction going in both directions. Somewhere between the dialysis center and multiple Cariboo Coffees, I found the record shop. It was located in the rear of a building that was a cross between a warehouse and thrift store.
The minimal signage and throwback van out front hinted at a dusty, musty dig the likes I hadn’t seen since Aubrie took me to G-Bs Records (RIP) in Decatur, IL. We had just started dating and when we walked into the shop it was littered with assorted folding tables, record racks, milk crates and cardboard boxes — each embracing the chaos of a 30 year record store left in the wake of post-industrial America. There may have been a half a dozen working lights but the brothers who owned the shop not only knew what was where in the store, but were keen experts on rap and hip-hop, selling mixes and boots featuring underground artists. It was one of the first shops I had heard about Mumble Rap, AND where I found mint O.G. pressings of early Thin Lizzy records.
The anticipation for such potential glory in Southern Minnesota was trampled as soon as I pulled on the security door. A classic rock station ushered me into an overly clean store. It wasn’t a hipster aesthetic or an OCD record fanatic clean but a stale kind of freshness that had hermetically sealed itself away from the outside world. It was time capsule in response the “out there” — not nostalgic or snobbish — but something less welcoming to a visitor.
The guy behind the counter looked up long enough to grunt before returning to his Subway lunch. The “new arrivals” section spilled across one endcap record rack to a series of boxes that dated back to 2022. The albums and crates weren't messy, but there was almost an apathy to the arrangement. You could almost hear the sigh of exasperated resentment diffuse into their alphabetical order.
I started to dig through the crates and felt eyes on me. When you grow up half-Filipino in the shadow of coalmining towns, you know when you’re being sized up. Immediately I felt like I was 18 and shopping at the Columbia Mall. A security guard followed me around the Bon-Ton while I was buying Oxfords and banded collar shirts. Tapping into my inner mod was hard enough in Northeastern PA circa ’93 — being seen as a potential shoplifter by a racist mall cop didn’t make it easier.
Now I can’t say Mr. Italian BMT saw me as a possible threat in his record shop, but I was not warmly received either. A local soon came in and the two were thick into a conversation about Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath remasters while I continued to shop under less tense scrutiny.
Again, I’m used to slack jaw stares and uncomfortable silences, but rarely do these things happen in a record store. Getting gas in rural Indiana? Absolutely. Having dinner with my wife in East Tennessee? Yup. Being stopped at the border as a child by US customs for looking “Mexican”? That happened in Michigan and California. But at a record store?
Still, by my very nature, I tried to shake it off. It had been a little while since I felt that kind of gaze on me and I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. It’s clear the shop is not busy and maybe I caught the guy on a bad day.
Then I went to the rap section.
In some shops like these, you feel like they carry things just because they are expected to carry them. It’s not even a “different strokes for different folks” vibe — I know enough stores where shop owners hold their noses while having Taylor Swift in stock. If you are truly a reflection of your community, you will sell records that you may not be into and you’re cool with it. No resentment. In many cases, these shops respect the passion someone brings to a record because we are all music lovers and we know what that feeling represents.
But this rap section…
There were about two crates worth of rap albums in the whole store, distilled down to this postage stamp footprint. Most of the records were new — Beastie Boys, Tupac, Biggie, Eminem, Mac Miller, Outkast — pretty standard fare. The one used LP I did stumble upon was a Vinyl Me Please edition of RZA’s Bobby Digital in Stereo. The album was always one of my favorite Wu-Tang solo spins. The album felt like Superfly for the hip-hop generation, with Curtis Mayfield’s street poetry reinterpreted for the 90s.
Written on the price tag: THUG RAP. While you could easily assume that hip-hop was not this store’s forte, it almost felt hostile. Nowhere else in the store did I see anything written on the price tags beyond the condition of used LPs (VG/VG+/M). THUG RAP just felt like judgment, and an ugly kind as well. Immediately, I heard all of the echoes that accompanied rap from closed-minded folks rush to fill the vacuum in my chest — how it’s not music, that it encourages violence, that it glorifies a lifestyle… all coded speak that belies an ignorance at best, a hatred at worst, and a pervasive fear that comes from othering.
It was the last straw for me and I left the shop without buying a single record. I think I can count the amount of times I’ve gone to a record store and bought nothing.
I spent the next hour or two wandering downtown, checking out a street-level cafe and reading a book while I waited for Aubrie. We drove the two-plus hours home down two-lane rural roads and as soon we got home, I immediately tracked down a copy of RZA as Bobby Digital in Stereo from a shop online, paying way more than I would have earlier that day.
I guess I was still processing that fact while talking to my former student at Abraxas. That experience in Southern Minnesota felt/still feels so counter to what record stores are and what they mean to me. I am not sure if that shop or the guy behind the counter was racist, and on some level, it doesn’t matter. What was clear to me was the fact that this shop had its community and did not feel like it needed anyone from beyond those confines. That happens in a small town a big city, or anywhere that wagons feel the need to become circled. When you’re on the outside looking in, the best thing you can do sometimes is to keep walking.
I woke up earlier than normal this morning and fumbled in predawn with my turntable. I played Hot Buttered Soul and drank cold coffee in the dark, waiting for the sun to fill my living room. I’m pretty sure I have a spare copy floating around somewhere for my former student. If not, I will have to track one down for him — that’s how all of this works.