The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store: A Global History

(Hardback)

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Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, record stores championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. Record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art. This book takes a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general. What was their role in shaping social practices, aesthetic tastes, and even, loosely put, ideologies From women-owned and independent record stores, to Reggae record shops in London, to Rough Trade in Paris, this book takes on a global and interdisciplinary approach to evaluating record stores. It collects stories and memories, and facts about a variety of local stores that not only re-centers the record store as a marketplace of ideas, but also explore and celebrate a neglected personal history of many lives.

Reviews

Record stores have been my support group, downfall, family room, grad school, sociological experiment, clubhouse, bank, ashram, ashtray and alibi for over fifty yearsapart from playing music, its all I know. This book is right up my alley and likely yours as well. * Peter Holsapple, Continental Drifters/The dBs *
The next best thing to going to a record store is reading about them. This is a fascinating study and I particularly enjoyed its international aspect from Christchurch to Teheran. We are all united by this unique subculture. * Geoff Travis, Founder of Rough Trade Records, UK *
Mixing memoir, history, and sociology, The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store is an unparalleled paean to the record store as a vital community resource that links local listeners to global flows of music, culture, and capital. Required reading for discophiles of all stripes. * Steve Waksman, Author of Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyonc, Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music, Smith College, USA *
This fascinating anthology proves that record stores have long been so much more than places to buy records. Essays document their important role as cultural actors who call communities and genres into being, play important roles in politics and national musical cultures, promote tourism, spread music around the globe, and continue through dark times. Viva la Record Store! * Norma Coates, Associate Professor, Western University, Canada, and President, US Branch, International Association for the Study of Popular Music *

Author Bio

Gina Arnold is an author, music journalist, and adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco, USA. She has been a writer for Rolling Stone, Spin, the Village Voice and many other publications, and is author of Liz Phairs Exile in Guyville (Bloomsbury, 2014), Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella (2018), and co-editor of Music/Video (Bloomsbury, 2017). John Dougan is Professor in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He has published essays and reviews in Rolling Stone, Spin, All Music Guide, American Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music and Society, Salon, and Perfect Sound Forever. He is the author of The Who Sell Out (Bloomsbury, 2006), and The Mistakes of Yesterday, The Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). Christine Feldman-Barrett is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia. A youth cultural historian, she is author of We are the Mods: A Transnational History of a Youth Subculture (2009) and A Womens History of the Beatles (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is also editor of Lost Histories of Youth Culture (2015). Matthew Worley is Professor of modern history at the University of Reading, UK. His more recent work has concentrated on the relationship between youth culture and politics in Britain, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. He is the author of No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976-1984 (2017) and co-founder of the Subcultures Network.