Three Movies That Understand Why We Keep Records

A record is technically just a way to play music.

That explanation has never been remotely sufficient.

Records become collections, arguments, memories, furniture, personality traits and occasionally evidence that you have completely lost control of a hobby. A good movie about records understands that the object is only the beginning.

Here are three that do.

High Fidelity

It would be difficult to start anywhere else.

Stephen Frears’ 2000 adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel moved the story from London to Chicago and put John Cusack behind the counter at Championship Vinyl, a struggling record shop where music taste is treated with roughly the same seriousness other people reserve for politics or religion.

Rob Gordon organizes his life through records and lists. Top five opening tracks. Top five breakups. The right record for the right moment. The wrong record revealing something deeply concerning about the person who bought it.

The joke works because record people recognize at least some of themselves in it.

Music becomes a filing system for memory. Rob can remember where he bought a record, when he bought it and what was happening in his life when he first heard it. His collection is not sitting beside his biography. It is the biography.

That part of High Fidelity has aged particularly well.

Streaming gives us access to almost everything, but it is not especially good at preserving the circumstances around how something entered your life. A record on a shelf can still remind you of the shop, the neighborhood, the person you were with and the version of yourself who thought buying it was important.

The record-store scenes are even better. Rob, Dick and Barry are knowledgeable, obnoxious, funny and completely incapable of separating the music they sell from their identities.

Anyone who finishes the movie wanting to disappear into some record bins for a few hours can start with our Chicago Record Store Guide. Championship Vinyl may be fictional. Spending too much time debating what to buy is not.

Empire Records

Empire Records is less interested in the psychology of collecting than in the other thing records created: the record store itself.

Released in 1995 and directed by Allan Moyle, the film follows the staff of an independent shop over one chaotic day as they try to prevent the business from being absorbed by a corporate chain.

There is Rex Manning Day. There is an employee who takes the store’s money to Atlantic City in an attempt to save the business. There are romances, disasters, a shoplifter and an improbable amount of dancing during working hours.

None of this is a particularly convincing model for operating a record store.

But the movie gets something else exactly right.

A good independent record store is not simply inventory arranged alphabetically.

It is a place.

People hang around. Clerks tell you what is good. Somebody puts something on that you have never heard before. Posters accumulate. Regulars appear. Staff develop strong opinions. Music discovery happens because another person is standing six feet away from you rather than because a recommendation engine noticed a pattern.

That world still exists.

Our Record Store Guide covers independent shops across Toronto, New York, Denver, Chicago and Los Angeles, including what they carry, what they specialize in and where they fit into the local music landscape.

Empire Records exaggerates almost everything about working in a record store.

It does not exaggerate the idea that losing one can feel like losing more than a retailer.

Vinyl

Then there is the movie record collectors should probably watch when they are feeling a little too pleased with their collections.

Alan Zweig’s Vinyl is a 2000 Canadian documentary about obsessive record collecting. Zweig, a Toronto filmmaker and collector himself, is less interested in what people collect than why they need to keep collecting it.

That distinction changes everything.

Instead of endless shots of rare pressings and people explaining why one mastering sounds better than another, Zweig starts poking at the psychology underneath the shelves.

How many records are enough?

Do you actually listen to all of them?

What would happen if you stopped buying them?

Is the collection making your life better, or have you constructed a small apartment-sized monument to your own compulsions?

Zweig includes himself in the interrogation, often speaking directly into a mirror about his own collecting, loneliness and anxieties. Among the other collectors are Harvey Pekar and Don McKellar, alongside people whose relationships with records range from enthusiastic to genuinely strange.

It is funny, uncomfortable and occasionally much darker than a documentary about buying LPs has any right to be.

It is also extremely Canadian.

For CouchLot, there is an obvious geographic connection here. Vinyl comes out of Toronto, a city where digging for physical music still means choosing among very different kinds of shops. Our Toronto Record Store Guide is a good place to start.

Watch the movie first.

Then decide whether going record shopping immediately afterward is the appropriate lesson.

The Record Is Never Just the Record

That is what connects all three movies.

High Fidelity uses records as memory and identity.

Empire Records uses the record store as a physical place where music culture happens.

Vinyl asks what happens when collecting the objects becomes a culture of its own.

Together they explain a lot about why physical music keeps refusing to disappear.

A stream can deliver the album.

It cannot completely replace finding it in a shop, carrying it home, putting it on a shelf, remembering where it came from or eventually wondering why you somehow own four copies.

We have written about that same attachment before in What Was Your First CD?, where hundreds of memories started with something as ordinary as bringing home a disc.

And if watching three movies about records predictably results in wanting to buy records, we have already accepted our role in the problem.

The CouchLot Physical Media collection includes designs like Keep Music Physical, Buy Vinyl and Play the Whole Album for people who remain comfortable letting the collection take up some space.