The comedy sketch that summed up record shop snobbery in the 2000s
The local record shop is often romanticised as a place where a diverse community of music lovers can all come together, not just to acquire packaged content for the good of capitalism, but to engage with one another, share opinions, and maybe get a friendly, life-changing recommendation or two.
During the early 2000s, however, when record stores were closing left and right as the bottom fell out of the compact disc era, a new ‘us against them’ mindset began to develop. Well, maybe it wasn’t that new: snobbery and gatekeeping have always been a facet of the record shop employee archetype. But in this case, with a whole ecosystem collapsing around them, the people behind the counters felt more under threat, and thus, less trusting of the general public; not to mention less patient with them.
This development, combined with the rise of a Brooklyn-infused hipster culture and the precise, laser-gun firing squads of the new music blogosphere, made record shops a potentially intimidating place to wander into around 2006, even if you were blog literate and fairly well versed in all of your Matador, Merge, and Warp artists. If you’re too young to remember these days, or have chosen to bury them in the dark recesses of your mind, one comedic artefact from this time period should help bring a lot of it back.
In 2006, a New York City sketch group called Human Giant was making a name for itself as regular performers at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Before eventually getting a short-lived show on MTV, they also made a few semi-viral videos in the earliest dark ages of YouTube, one of which was a little three and a half minute clip recorded in a popular Manhattan indie record shop called Other Music.
The skit, which was also called ‘Other Music’, includes some young comedians who would go on to considerable success years later, including the controversy-entangled stand-up Aziz Ansari, Bobby Moynihan of Saturday Night Live, and Julie Klausner of Difficult People. Ansari plays one of the clerks, who is seen at the outset reading a Japanese music magazine, despite later admitting to a customer that he cannot read or speak Japanese, and the tone was set.
The rest of ‘Other Music’ plays out as both a scathing satire of hipster pretentiousness and hypocrisy, as well as a sort of exploitation horror film, warning any uneducated pop music listeners about the risks of asking for the new Killers record or the Garden State soundtrack anywhere outside of a Walmart.
Not merely cruel and judgmental, Ansari and his fellow shop clerk, played by the deadpanning Andy Blitz, are also full of shit and very chatty and intrusive. When he sees a customer looking at a Sufjan Stevens CD, the most 2006 thing imaginable, Blitz’s character claims, after mispronouncing every letter of Stevens’ name, to have once played in a band with him. Ansari corners another customer to brag about going trick-or-treating with Interpol bassist Carlos D in May. When the confused customer notes that Halloween is in October, Ansari fires back, “Not when you’re Carlos D! That guy doesn’t play by the rules”.
A final clueless and ill-fated customer is informed by the clerks about a secret concert that Aughts freak-folk hero Devandra Banhart will be playing “inside a dumpster”. That doesn’t sound very appealing to the person, leading Blitz to mockingly respond, “Sorry, it’s not in Wembley Stadium”.
Full confession: I worked in a record store in 2006, and this was the funniest video my co-workers and I saw that year; partially because it was ridiculous, and partially because it was just true enough to make one justifiably uncomfortable: “Am I this annoying?”
It’s just unfortunate that a higher quality version of the video has never found its way to the internet, leaving us with just a grainy re-post of the original, looking not only like a remnant of its time, but absolutely ancient in YouTube years. It should be noted that Other Music, the shop itself, closed in 2017, presumably overtaken by so many boring basic people that even Carlos D couldn’t save the day.
