If you really think I knew what the f*** I was doing, you’re out of your mind. | | | | Causing a commotion: Madonna fans outside Tower Records in Greenwich Village, April 2003.
(James Devaney/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “If you really think I knew what the f*** I was doing, you’re out of your mind.”
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| | rantnrave:// Imagine walking into a record store (I know, stretch that imagination as best you can), wandering over to the BEYONCÉ section and seeing a few copies of LEMONADE, one or two I AM SASHA FIERCEs and maybe, maybe not, a stray copy of DANGEROUSLY IN LOVE in the racks. And imagine that's it. No B'DAY. No 4. No self-titled 2013 album either. Too bad if you were looking for "DRUNK IN LOVE" today. Can't stock everything, right? Right. That's what record stores used to be like, more or less (do people remember this???), until TOWER RECORDS started disrupting the market across the US and eventually around the world by essentially AMAZON'ing the business. "Arguably the first nationwide record supermarket," VARIETY wrote in its obituary of Tower's revered founder, RUSS SOLOMON, who died of a heart attack Sunday while drinking whiskey and complaining about someone's ACADEMY AWARDS outfit (one of the best final acts in rock and roll history; the GRAMMY AWARDS would have been too on-the-nose, probably). I remember walking into the Tower on 4th and Broadway in New York for the first time and being overwhelmed with wonder. What had seemed impossible a day earlier suddenly was possible. They.Had.Everything. It was like encountering SPOTIFY in the flesh: every search query answered, every click rewarded with sound. It was revolutionary. Solomon and Tower changed the music business. And it wasn't just records (and books and magazines and blank tapes and guitar strings and and and). It was community. Sometimes you went to Tower to buy records. Sometimes you went to hang out, to waste time, to start your evening, to end your evening. That was Ross Solomon's personality. Freewheeling, loose, laid back, West coast. Fun. A little impulsive. Tower never lived to meet the actual Spotify; its US operation went under in August 2006, four months after Spotify was founded and more than a year before it launched. But Spotify was the culmination of a decade of blindingly fast change in music retail that literally wiped Tower, once a billion-dollars-a-year enterprise, off the map. Illegal file sharing. Legal downloading. Amazon. Tower misread all those changes and kept expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint—with hundreds of millions of borrowed dollars instead of raising money by going public. "That was the dumbest thing I ever did," Solomon told the NEW YORK TIMES last year. Then again, without doing dumb things, Tower wouldn't have been Tower and PULSE MAGAZINE would never have been published and you wouldn't know the phrase "handtruck fuel" and I might not have been struck by that sense of wonder on 4th and Broadway. Recklessness was part of the brand. And a crazy love for music, and for the music business. "Record labels, distribution companies, radio, concert artists were all a great big giant family that was having a marvelous time," Solomon once said. "It wasn’t just the money that you made or didn’t make. It was the fun." RIP... COLIN HANKS' 2015 documentary ALL THINGS MUST PASS: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOWER RECORDS" is available on-demand at most TV providers, at VIMEO and elsewhere, and it captures the spirit of the company and its founder and the times really well... It's been unclear for some time if MARTIN SHKRELI is in possession of the WU-TANG CLAN's ONCE UPON A TIME IN SHAOLIN in album, or what it would even mean to be in possession of that elusive sonic artifact. But if he does, it looks like he's going to have to give it back. To, um, the government... NICKI MINAJ pulled a verse she had recorded for TORY LANEZ's new album because she didn't like a text he sent her about it. Stars, they text just like us. Poorly. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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