For those who don’t know, there once was a record store on East 4th Street and Lafayette in New York City called Other Music. When I was a student at NYU in the early 2010’s, Other Music was pretty much synonymous with the East Village and a great place to kill time in between classes. Occasionally, there’d be in-store performances or a record signing. I remember my old roommate leaving her job at the NYU library to run down the street and get a vinyl signed by Interpol, who were there promoting their newest record.
Other Music was an institution that seemed like it had been there for decades and would still be there in the decades to come. But the store closed on June 25, 2016, for all the predictable reasons: a changing music landscape, skyrocketing rent, etc. Luckily, during its closure filmmakers Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller captured the store’s final weeks for Other Music, a documentary available digitally on Amazon Prime on August 25th after COVID-19 disturbed its theatrical run originally set for April of this year.
The 85-minute documentary follows Other Music’s eclectic staff, celebrity and non-celebrity customers, and co-owners Josh Madell and Chris Vanderloo, who opened the shop back when there was still a huge Tower Records only just around the corner. Band members from The National, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mogwai, TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend, Le Tigre, Depeche Mode, and Animal Collective all make an appearance—not to mention Jason Schwartzman and Benecio Del Toro. A mix of talking heads and occasionally wonderful clips of animation bring color and depth not only to the lives of the people behind the store, but those who frequented it.
At first, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the store’s origins, which feel like something out of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity or Generation X’s piece de resistance Empire Records—both of which were released in 1995, the exact same year that Other Music opened in the East Village. Co-owners Madell and Vanderloo, along with former co-owner Jeff Gibson, met in the back of a video rental shop that also had a music counter. After a few years there, the trio jumped ship, opened Other Music–named for how Vanderloo always described his taste: “I’m into other music”–and started curating a collection of hyper-specific genres that any other main music chain might simply categorize as “World Music.”
Former staff reflect on the shop’s quirky categorization methods, including sections ambiguously named “In,” “Out,” and “Then,” as well as the infamous employee manual, which specified that Other Music prioritized “new, unknown, or unheard bands.” The store obviously attracted employees with unusual or encyclopedic knowledge of off-beat genres like Krautrock, noise, and decadanse. Basically, if you were looking to listen to some truly weird shit, you could find it at Other Music.
If it sounds like the store and its staff were intimidating and bordered on pretentious, it’s because they were. And this film shows that the staff and even some of the celebrity customers were aware of that. As someone who dropped into the shop every so often but wasn’t a die-hard regular, even I knew to not ask for, say, the newest Coldplay record. But if I was looking for an album that sounded like a cross between David Bowie’s Berlin records, Bob Dylan, and the long-forgotten British group Stellastarr*, I’m sure they’d find the perfect match. In a way, Other Music tried to preemptively provide precise music suggestions before Spotify and its algorithms were even created.
For a place obsessed with being on the edge and always doing something new, Other Music could talk the talk and walk the walk. They launched their own website that included a sophisticated mail-order system back in 1998 and a music-review newsletter in 2000 that eventually garnered over 10,000 recipients. Not long after iTunes was on the market, they created their own digital download store in 2007. When that digital store closed a few years later, Lou Reed’s manager called Other Music saying that Reed was reportedly “despondent and depressed,” not knowing where he’d buy his music now.
Aside from fun tidbits like that, the documentary is most effective when it focuses on the emotional tether that ties the artists and community to the record store. In Other Music’s final days, customers arrive in droves, buying up what they can, hugging the staff, and tearfully explaining what the place meant to them. I must admit, as someone who was a customer and still remembers when the store closed, I was looking forward to how Other Music would be portrayed here. It can be so easy to quickly become overly nostalgic and didactic when talking about the importance of a quirky music scene or local record store. We can fall into the traps of no man, you don’t understand, this place was special. This place just got me. And some of that does happen in Other Music, but all of it is real and all of it is true.
And that’s when the film really got me thinking. Other Music isn’t really a documentary about an important record store that closed a few years ago; it’s about every record store that has closed and every record store that will close in the future. It’s about the pain of losing music in general, and losing a safe space where you feel like you belong. As sad as it is to watch a 20-year-old business clear its shelves, break apart its CD and vinyl racks, and notice the shadowed ghosts of records that once lined the high walls, it’s even sadder to imagine what record store will close next. What music venue will shutter next. What music magazine will fold next.
I didn’t watch this film in a theater but at home, like almost everyone else in the world has had to do this year. In the last six months, COVID-19 has potentially forever altered movie theaters, record stores, and music venues across the globe. I couldn’t help but see the end of Other Music as an emblem of what could happen to everyone’s favorite local record store. At various points in my life, Amoeba Records in Hollywood, Hi-Fi Records in Astoria, Queens, Bleecker Street Records in New York, Rough Trade in Brooklyn, and Rasputin Music in Berkeley, California were my Other Music, and I don’t know where I’d be without them. They gave me art, love, and a space to totally be myself. Other Music captures the heart that beats beneath every record shop, and made me realize how much I miss flipping through vinyl, rubbing elbows with someone in Indie Rock, and paying for a brand new record. Other Music reminded me that record stores don’t just offer music but much-needed art and friendship. I can’t wait to go back.
Other Music is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
