Why our nostalgia for music stores is misplaced

I’m no high-powered Dalal Street wheelin'-dealin' whiz destined for grand failure, but the one investment I made a decade-and-a-half ago that I still regret to this day was spending Rs 125 on a tape of Use Your Illusions II by Guns N’ Roses.

I want to return that money to my parents with compounded interest, accounting for inflation as well as a punitive fee for buying such shit. (But I won’t.) Anyway, for some background, tapes are these things that used to exist, and they were more useless than floppy disks.

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"Millennials" — arguably the ugliest word in the dictionary? — are in the unenviable situation of having lived through the transition from the pre-internet world to today’s only-internet world, and being vocal supporters of both thanks to age-induced naivety.

Most are only in their 20s or 30s, but they seem to have developed early-onset nostalgia. I, belonging to the unfortunate lot mentioned above, suffer from the same affliction, and tend to reminisce about a time when music stores were a real thing, and not a punchline.

They used to be huge, and they were filled with cassettes (and CDs), like how malls today are filled with people. They also had these little frills: a Sony PlayStation 1 with a couple of non-wireless controllers attached to a non-flatscreen television. You could try it out, and maybe buy the console, or at least a video game or two.

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Coffee mugs, key chains, trinkets, store merchandise, and other unnecessary add-ons to tempt you. They always played the most popular MTV songs of the time — Shaggy’s "It Wasn’t Me" got frequent airplay — and the staff was trained to pretend like they’d grown up inside an Ahuja speaker, always bopping their head and tapping their foot.

Music stores were this perfect synthesis of bookstores (remember those?) and malls — you had racks instead of escalators; cassettes instead of books (remember those?). Tens of hundreds of thousands of racks.

Said racks were mostly filled with junk. The majority of them had these loud, garish, technicolour album covers of substandard, obnoxious Bollywood tapes and CDs. That, and rack after rack of devotional music; understandably so, because that’s what sold.

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They’re all obsolete now (good riddance…?), but over time we’ve seen music stores turn almost into institutions. Enough people have shed tears of blood on to their keyboards writing heartfelt tributes to Mumbai’s Rhythm House after it shut down.

But what of Delhi (because those are the only two cities in India that matter, duh)? Delhi had this quasi-iconic Planet M in South Extension; I’m not sure if it’s in part one or two, but it’s on this side.

There was a tiny one next to the Odeon theatre in Connaught Place. The chain was spread all over, with a handful of indie retailers trying their best to fight big business. Also, there was Hyde’s (name changed in case it still exists) in Palika Bazaar, which specialised in pirated and smuggled albums that had little to no chance of releasing in India.

The massive Music World franchise existed as well; the unreasonably expansive Music World in Ansal Plaza being the flagship store for this particular chain — it’s where I bought my COM LAG (2plus2isfive) CD (a hard-to-find EP by Radiohead that I felt very special owning for at least the next ten years). It’s also where I bought that damn Use Your Illusions II tape.

All these stores had some slight sense of identity to set one apart from the other (unlike malls), but in the end, what united them was their contempt for English music, which was consigned to these three racks way at the back. They didn’t even bother arranging the albums alphabetically.

Two of those racks had the popular MTV-airplay albums — lots and lots of the Beatles, Britney Spears, NSYNC, Christina Aguilera, the works — while the third one, right in the corner where none of the tub-thumping employees would be stationed, where even the lights would flicker and go out from time to time, housed the slightly left-field, commercial-adjacent releases.

I picked up a Blue Oyster Cult CD from this particular rack once, and I literally never bothered to even open it; it’s still somewhere in my ancestral home gathering dust, plastic and all. I also picked up a tape of From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, a live album by Nirvana that I didn’t know existed until then.

I look back fondly at those memories. I think of how hip I felt stumbling upon these rare (at the time) albums, thanks to dumb luck and nothing else; of taking risks with the limited money I had been sanctioned by the mother lode; of buying Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby, and hoping my parents didn’t see the Parental Advisory sticker on it, then scratching out the U, C, and K on the song "F**king in Heaven" off that album with a Rotomac pen. It was a thrill, and it had its charm. But I don’t miss it.

That’s the thing with this fetishising of nostalgia — it seems to practically be a badge of honour.

"I’m a '90s kid" is a proud proclamation — it’s just a matter of fluke, one that your biological parents should take the credit (or blame) for, not you. "I stuck a pen inside old cassettes; I used Nataraj pencils; I saw Tu Tu Main Main and Hum Paanch on TV; I wore Action shoes; I chewed on Phantom Cigarettes; I ate Fatafat and Melody and Swad every day; I (my parents) paid for music and I had a Walkman." Just keep quiet. 

None of that is relevant now. Today, I don’t feel like a manual scavenger hunting Planet M — iconic and important as it may have been; and it’s a shame it has no value today — hoping and praying that maybe, just maybe I can find something.

That of the five tapes I buy this month, hopefully one of them will be worth my time, while I convince myself that I like the other four because of middle-class guilt.

No longer do I feel superior at owning an original Temple of the Dog tape while literally no one else I know has even heard of it. No longer do I act like a pretentious, all-knowing dick about it (OK, maybe I do).

Today, I have iTunes and Bandcamp and SoundCloud and YouTube and Apple Music and Spotify (yuck) and Tidal. And music stores. I don’t have to wait three months, in the faint hope that a new album might make its way to India.

I have free choice — it’s a double-edged sword, because I can’t quite hone my taste in the same way I could, through random discovery (apparently), but it also means I never have to buy a Guns N’ Roses album again.

I wouldn’t even know the underground existed. I have now at my disposal thousands of artists that wouldn’t have existed for me if the shift didn’t happen — it’s a new world altogether — so let’s not pretend, at least in India, that the modern state of consumption of music is a bad thing.