I was so sad to hear the news about Music World today. Canada's last Canadian owned national music chain lost $9 million last year and most of their 72 outlets will shut down after January. After the closing of Sam The Record Man's flagship store last summer this feels like a painful déjà vu.
I have countless memories of hanging out with my best friend at our local shopping mall's Music World in the 80's. My friend had a crush on a guy that worked there (and now that over twenty years have passed I guess I can admit I thought he was pretty cool too) but that wasn't the big reason we were at the store all the time. It was the music. The record store felt like a gateway to a cooler place, in our case, a gateway to the U.K. where most of our favourite music came from at the time. Duran Duran. The Thompson Twins. Paul Young. The English Beat (and then General Public). The Smiths. The Cure. Depeche Mode. Howard Jones. Tears For Fears. Kate Bush. U2. Simple Minds. Banarama. Talk Talk. Til Tuesday. Crowded House. The list goes on and on...
At the record store there was always the promise of a new album or an ultra cool band we hadn't heard of yet. This still happens, of course, and it will continue to happen but mostly not in any shared physical space outside a concert hall or other music venue. In the same way people enjoy being surrounded by novels at a bookstore (rather than having them delivered to their door via Amazon, Indigo or Barnes and Noble) I loved the feeling of being surrounded by music. In the 80's that was mostly tapes and wow did I work hard for those tapes. I didn't care too much about buying new pair of jeans (or the legwarmers or mesh tops that were popular at the time, although I did have those too) but tapes!! Tapes, tapes, tapes. I listened to my favourites so often that they got tangled up inside and had to be pulled out of their cases and strung back in again (although they never really sounded right after that).
I can't help but think that people who grow up not realizing a record store is someplace to haunt are missing something. I know people mostly download from iTunes or elsewhere now (sometimes I do too) and that you can discover any number of cool new bands on MySpace but I, for one, will continue to drop in on the physical spaces where a passion for music reigns - and flick through the racks.
C. K. Kelly Martin
likes to write things down and is a firm believer in the John Lennon quote, "If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliché that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal." She's written a middle grade sci-fi and multiple young adult books including I KNOW IT'S OVER, YESTERDAY, and DELICATE. Her most recent novel, released under the name Cara Martin, is a sci-fi centring around a young Canadian woman cryogenically frozen during a global pandemic and then reanimated to find herself and the rest of the world drastically changed, and Canada under threat.
