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How To Look Cool In A Record Store

1.) Most record stores will make you check your backpack or purse at the door to prevent theft. Bring a duffle bag filled with as many copies of “Walk Among Us” by the Misfits as it takes to fill up a duffle bag. Keep it unzipped so when you hoist it onto the counter a couple copies fall out and the clerk has to try and cram them back in. Look over the rim of your aviators (you should be wearing aviators) and tell them, “Just so there’s no confusion later, I brought these bad boys from home.” Don’t wait for them to respond, they will be too impressed to anyway.

2.) Reading isn’t cool at all. Pretend you can’t read any of the section signs or any of the album titles or anything. Make a big show of locating the new releases section by smell.

3.) Pick up a copy of a Led Zeppelin album and say, “more like overra-ted Zeppelin” loud enough that everyone in the store can hear you. Do it more than once.

4.) Find every vinyl you can with a naked lady on the cover and fan them out onto the floor and stand over them, nodding your head. Make a lot of noises like, “MMMHM,” and “YESSIREE” and if you can, maybe have a big ol’ boner to let people know you can really appreciate that sort of thing.

5.) Make a big show of moving every Beatles album into the Children’s section. If anyone tries to stop you, wink at them with alternating eyes until they get it.

6.) There’s nothing cooler than being above stuff. Hover approximately two (2) feet above the ground at all times. If you can’t levitate yourself on command yet, the following are acceptable substitutes: Stilts, Tall Bikes, Standing On Someone’s Shoulders Under An Oversized Trench Coat Like The Little Rascals, and Constantly Jumping.

7.) Buy something and return it immediately so the sales staff knows you’re not fucking around. Do this a few times. End each transaction by clarifying, “I am not fucking around.”

8.) What is EDM music? I don’t know, but it sounds pretty cool, right?

9.) Steal an album. Just fucking take it. Make a big show of sticking it under your shirt so that when you leave the clerk will go, “Hey, you can’t steal that.” Tell him he’s mistaken, that music is a fluid universal construct built on personal and individual experience belonging to the people and so technically you’re not stealing anything that may or may not already belong to you. When he continues to demand you pay for the merchandise, ask him if he’d demand someone pay for a sunset or a child’s laugh. Ask him how much he’d charge for the scent of a lover’s perfume lingering in the air after the first time you made love. Ask him what the store’s return policy is on the first time you saw your father cry. At this point he’ll be getting angry and threatening to call the police, tell him they won’t set him free. Tell him he sells remnants of an outdated world, the last dying gasp of a capitalist approach to art, and that he and his merchants of cool will become entombed in mausoleums built on the fundamental flaws of materialistic desire. At this point the cops will arrive and tell you to put down the album or you’ll be arrested. Spit at them with contempt. Tell them they don’t get to suddenly start fighting to preserve the value and worth of creativity, tell them they forfeited the right to defend artistic expression the day they pinned on a badge that represents the absolute antithesis of independent thought. Tell them they don’t exist to protect art, tell them art exists to protect them. Every song, every lyric, every arrangement, every composition is created and enjoyed in direct defiance of what they’ve chosen to align with, and as sure as trumpets brought down Jericho’s walls, there will come a day where they find themselves undone by aural radicalism. At this point the clerk will be moved by your words and remember the way music used to make him feel. He’ll tell the police to leave, that he made a mistake by calling, but they’ll tell him it’s too late, the law’s the law, and you respond by softly replying, “the only law is empathy, pigs” and then you begin to sing ���Home On The Range.’ One of the officers will begin to cry, because this is the song his mother used to soothe him with as a young boy in his bed, afraid of the dark. He’ll remember the last time he saw her, how proud she was of him, and fall to his knees, crying out, “I was so afraid of the dark I became a puppet of the dark. The values we protect are not our own, our mothers have stopped comforting us!” He’ll pull out his gun and shove it in his mouth, desperate to forget how far he’s strayed from her pride, and when he does you must lean in and whisper, “When the comforters have gone, the burden is on you to take their place, and brother, this is no great burden. Sing a song to a frightened world, rub their backs and assure them everything will be okay. They need you now, more than ever.” He’ll take the gun out of his mouth and the power of your words will have turned it into ash in his hand. Smile knowingly at the gathered crowd (because by now everyone in the store and everyone on the street will be surrounding the counter) and begin to leave. Before you go, the clerk who called the cops will impulsively blurt out, “Wait! What was the album you were stealing? We must know what musical recording could inspire such a shared cosmic shift in out collective humanity. Please, we beg you!” and the crowd will chime in as one, “YES, YES, PLEASE, WE BEG YOU!” And at this point you will slowly, deliberately pull the album out from under your shirt, revealing the cover bares the clerk’s own face, eyes filled with tears and wonder. The title, in simple black text, reads: TODAY YOU ARE FREE. You set it on the counter and whisper, “You should listen to this one. It’s a new release, but I think it’ll be a classic someday.” And then you walk out, into the night, never to be seen again.

10.) Wear a Thin Lizzy t-shirt or something. They’re pretty cool.