Other Music was a seminal NYC record store for 20 years. Emilie Friedlander, a frequent shopper there, reflects on the film of the same name and a legacy lost to the algorithm.

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In the early 2000s, walking into an independent record store in New York City was frightening – especially if you were young and the kind of person whose sense of self was bound up in music. Years before the internet made rarefied musical expertise something one could access at the click of a button, knowing about outsider psych and tropicalia records that nobody else did was the ultimate currency of cool – and walking up to the counter with your selection felt less like a commercial transaction than a test. Clerks at East Village institution Kim’s Video, a dry cleaning shop turned film and music emporium, were so prickly with customers they deemed to have sub-par taste that one former patron compared his love for the place to an «S & M» relationship. (I worked there for a few summers in high school, and he wasn’t off the mark.)

The first time I wandered into Other Music, a cramped hole-in-the-wall on West Fourth Street founded in 1995 by three former Kim’s employees, I felt like I had walked into the most intimidating record store of all. In what felt like a punk move at the time, owners Josh Madell and Chris Vanderloo had set up shop catty-corner to a giant Tower Records; like a David to that corporate retail Goliath, the shop seemed perfectly situated to attract foot traffic from lost customers who hadn’t been able to find something they wanted to hear across the street. And instead of the usual headers, like «rock» and «world music», its inventory was divided into sections that seemed designed to disorient one’s mental schema of the lines of genre and taste.

Counter Culture

There was «THEN», for musicians who were no longer around and kicking; «IN», for the sort of vaguely fashionable indie releases one might read about on Pitchfork; and «OUT», for more abstract sounds of the Stockhausen variety. There was a shelf dedicated to up-and-coming hip hop artists in the city (rapper Beans was a former employee, and was rumored to routinely recommend albums by the Antipop Consortium, his own group); an unusually extensive psychedelia and krautrock section; and even a card dedicated to a genre the store had invented called «Decadanse», for vintage easy listening music in the lineage of Serge Gainsbourg. In what felt like a mission statement for the entire operation, «Out» was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door.

And yet, as Rob Hatch-Miller and Puloma Basu’s quietly poignant retrospective of the store suggests, there was always something strangely utopian about the place. Contrary to the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of record store culture in the aughts – a facet of the hipster legacy we can be thankful no longer holds much primacy, even as we lament the demise of record stores – its staff genuinely reflected the diversity of the city. And as much as it was the kind of music-geek mecca that Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore, one of many high-profile musicians interviewed in the film, would make a point of visiting whenever he passed through the city – its clerks always seemed more interested in sharing their knowledge than hoarding it. In one scene, we see a staffer search the store up and down to help a young woman and her mother track down an actual Depeche Mode album, frantically pantomiming the album cover as another searches for the out-of-print record online.

Team Humanity

After hearing stories from Animal Collective and Interpol about how Other Music was the only shop that was willing to stock their scrappy early recordings, and learning how gushing word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews from its employees sparked international cult interest in records like Gary Wilson’s You Think You Really Know Me and William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, it’s hard not to feel heartbroken when we see people emptying out the room and breaking down the shelves in 2016, when the shop became yet another casualty of the internet. Duane Harriott, the clerk who rediscovered Gary Wilson and who everybody else seems to regard as the most prolific tastemaker of the bunch, tells us he thinks he’ll remember the store as a place where «the underdog always won». Which brings us to the film’s most painful insight, however conflicted about record snob culture we may be: what other underdogs will we never find out about when algorithms, instead of humans, are doing the curating?