Scavengers at The Tower

Yesterday I was down in Redondo Beach area going to a friend's house, and I stopped by a Tower Records that was going out of business; had a "Five Days Left" sign blazooned across the front of the store. I had to stop, maybe there might have been a CD or a DVD that I could buy (I snagged teh 20th Anniversary of PLATOON the other day from the Tower in Sherman Oaks for only eight bills).

I walked in the door and was like, "FUCK" the place look liked a bunch of scavengers in a Mad Max film had looted the place, and recently, too. All the aisles and bins pushed to the side and where picked clean of anything of substance, the workers looked like that didn't give a rat's ass about anything (and why should they? They probably don't have any new jobs lined up).



It was sad to see this store, shit any store, in this state of complete "i-don't-give-a-fuck", because records and tapes and CDs mean a lot to me, nothing can soothe you like music, nothing can set the mood to get some fuckin' done like music, and yet we all have migrated to acquiring our music thru wired digital means -- with no desire to amass CDs anymore. I love album cover art, there's just something potentially cool and interesting about the artist that can be said in a few brief photographs... no all we have to look forward to is, the squared image on iTunes or what ever pose struck their fancy for a Rolling Stone or Vibe photo shoot.

Let's face facts though, mp3 files sound like shit, unless their being played back on those two-way or micro speakers that most computers come with OR over the earbud headphones that came with your iPod or Zune (is anyone even thinking of wasting their money on a Zune? Fuck, Bill Gates, if you ask me; and I don't give a shit that he's giving away his money to needy Africans -- and they need it, too).

But you know what? This is just the beginning, the face of things to come, when all the retail establishments that dispense with crap that we really don't need (yeah we NEED music, but not nearly 75% of SHIT that is recorded and sold to us). Just go to a Third World Country and see if they got music stores there, and then imagine what Tower was looking like when it was one it's last legs, and then look around at the other stores in the shopping centers and burn that image in your mind, 'cause something wicked this way comes...