A trip to Plan 9 Music
I took my son and daughter to Plan 9 Music on Saturday. Before we set off, I set a budget for both of $50 each. My daughter, who recently has been scouring every CD binder of mine she can find in our house, picked up a handful of CDs including Velvet Underground, Cyndi Lauper, and the Sundays.
My son snagged some DVDs of The Simpsons, Ghostbusters 1 and 2, and a poster for his bedroom wall. He also managed to sandwich a John Wick 2 movie in between which I didn’t catch at purchase. My wife told me about it on our walk when I said, “Yeah, he wanted to get Inglourious Basterds and John Wick 2, but I told him no,” to which my wife said, “He got the John Wick movie.”
Sneaky.
I didn’t buy anything. I just browsed. I momentarily felt like my teenage self from The Record Exchange era, going through the alphabet: B for Bad Brains, J for Jimi Hendrix Experience, O for Operation Ivy, T for Thelonious Monk. And while I didn’t buy anything this time, I may need to return to get two band posters I saw that would look nice in my office: one from Sonic Youth and another from Black Flag.
Of the ten Plan 9 Music stores that once operated across Virginia, only two locations still exist: one in Richmond, where it was founded in 1981, and the other, where I live, in Charlottesville. The Plan 9 location in Charlottesville is in a smart location in my opinion, next door to the retro video game shop Super Bit Cville.
Gen Z and the new countercultural analog movement
I think it’s cool my kids are getting into analog entertainment. Apparently that’s a thing being written about by everyone and his brother of Gen Z. They think AI sucks (agreed) and want to browse a music store that has physical albums on its shelves and not just something an algorithm generates based on what it assumes to be their taste.
I’m not under the impression the majority of Generation Z feels this way, especially about entertainment. Many still seem very much glued to their phones and are perfectly fine with listening to music via streaming. But for those that solely choose this option, how many are listening to a full album, cover to cover, or are they just listening to individual songs of various artists like a never-ending mixtape?
The mixtape used to be a special creation: friend to friend, boyfriend to girlfriend and vice-versa. Here’s this thing I made just for you I think you’ll like. There’s some hidden meaning within the songs: a shared moment, a line in the verse you may catch others may miss, a secret garden. Now, the mixtape is the playlist and the playlist is the default and it takes no time to create one. This ease of creation forces it to lose the weight it carries altogether.
An album from start to finish is a different experience. It’s something I stress to my kids. On more than one occasion, they’ve heard me say, “Listen to the full album, not just individual songs. You may find your favorite songs aren’t on a pre-determined playlist.”
I’m not opposed to listening to music via an app. I do it every day. It’s convenient, but when it comes to discovering a new band or album you’d never heard of, it’s hard to beat a record shop where you sometimes take a chance, sound unheard. It’s a physical experience and a smartphone will never replicate this.
Being able to take my kids to a music store yesterday morning and leaf through records and CDs and yes, even the occasional cassette, carried with it a touch of nostalgia mixed with the present I relished. We’re going to have to make this a recurring theme on our Saturdays here and there.
Most of the bands I fell in love with when I was a teenager originated from inside The Record Exchange in Lynchburg, another music store that existed in my youth that coincidentally was bought out by Plan 9 in 2006 when MP3s and other digital formats were steadily wiping out music shops left and right: from the national chains inside large shopping malls to the small independent music stores operating out of a small space with a more affordable lease.
I plan to write more about this in the coming weeks. Yesterday’s trip to Plan 9 Music unearthed some old memories.
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