Featured Essay: How to Listen to Records

by Mike Monteiro

The following essay is a recent essay from Mike Monteiro’s newsletter where he answers a reader question a week. Since this week’s essay was about records I reached out to him and asked if we could reprint it on IHTOV. If you have a question for Mike, about records or anything else, feel free to ask it here.

Ok, so here’s a recent story. A few weeks ago I headed to one of my locals with a bag of records in hand. I’d spent a couple of months putting aside records I didn’t want anymore, either because I decided I didn’t really care for them, or because someone in the band turned out to be a sexpest, or because I’d accidentally bought a copy of something I already had. There were lots of reasons, all vibe no formula. When you live in an apartment, space is at a premium, records come and go, and there’s a certain thrill when you can pay for new records with old records.

So off I go with my little bag of records. I hop on the bus that takes me to the record store, I wander down a small hill, I get to the store, and hand my unwanted records to a clerk to be “evaluated” then wander the store looking for new records. Thirty minutes or so later, I’ve successfully exchanged a large stack of unwanted records for a smaller stack of new records that I’m ready to take home and listen to.

As I head out of the store I spot my bus. Like an idiot I go running for it, only to trip on one of our many glorious uneven sidewalks, take a header, and land firmly on my chest. My little bag of records flew in one direction, my eyeglasses flew in a different direction, and I bruised a few ribs.

Short aside about ribs: Ribs (and toes) are the cheapest bones in the human body to break. There’s absolutely nothing that a doctor can do for them other than to tell you to not do anything stupid for a few weeks and take a lot of ibuprofen. You can of course—if you’re insured—go to the ER where you’ll wait 8 hours to be seen by a doctor, get a very expensive x-ray, and then be told that you bruised a couple of ribs and just don’t do anything stupid and take a lot of ibuprofen until your ribs heal. (Oh, with toes you can just tape the broken one to one that’s not broken.) I cannot stress enough how much you shouldn’t take medical advice from me. Moving on…

I got the wind knocked out of me, and my neighbors were nice enough to slowly get me up. Someone handed me my glasses. Someone handed me my bag of records. Several people asked me if I was ok, and when they realized I was unable to respond, they hung out a little bit until I could. Which was nice. Amazingly, the bus waited for me. And after thanking everyone for their help, I got on.

Short aside about neighbors: if the last few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that neighbors will look out for one another in a way that no one else will.

Once I took my seat on the bus, and the adrenaline started wearing off, I realized how hurt I was, which we’ve already covered. I also realize how much worse it could’ve been. I still had my teeth, I didn’t hit my head, I didn’t smash my eyeglasses. (Childhood trauma always has me check my eyeglasses before anything else.) I also realized that all my records were bent on the corner that hit the sidewalk. Just the covers. The discs turned out to be undamaged. But now, every time I pull out one of those records I’ll remember taking a header on the sidewalk, I’ll feel my ribs, and be thankful that they healed just fine. Then I’ll put the record on.

Every record tells a story. Those records now have theirs.

I’m lucky enough that I’ve been able to travel to various parts of the planet, and obsessed enough about records that the first thing I check for in an unfamiliar city is record stores. So every once in a while I’ll pull a record from the stacks and be transported to a cold February day in Copenhagen, or a warm summer evening in Melbourne, or that time I was able to successfully haggle for a very rare Beastie Boys box set in a hole-in-the-wall record store in Paris. All of those records have stories, and pulling a record from its cover is like pulling a memory out of a box.

When my daughter still lived with us we’d go to the record store and I’d tell her to pick something out for me and then we’d walk home while she told me the story of that band, and why she’d picked it out. Those conversations would eventually reveal themselves to be about larger topics, which she might not have been ready to talk about otherwise. All the records she chose for me now contain those memories as well.

Obviously, there’s nothing about records that make them uniquely capable of holding onto and triggering memories. Your thing might be postcards, or fridge magnets, or books, or physical maps. You might even be one of those weirdos that takes pictures of yourself and your family on vacation. But we all tend to have objects that we map our memories onto. Mine are records. Yours doesn’t have to be.

In fact, let me do you a service: if you do not currently have a turntable, or records, don’t get one! They’re expensive, they take up way too much space in your home, and they’re a giant pain in the ass when you move. You will also end up inviting audiophiles into your life, and they are exhausting people. They will argue with you about wiring. They will argue with you about styluses, they will argue with you about speaker placement. They will also make you listen to records that you don’t want to listen to and berate you while using words like “appreciation,” and phrases like “you’re just cheating yourself if you don’t get the gold plugs.” They will talk to you about the warmth of vinyl, and child—I am 58 years old, I have tinnitus, I can’t hear shit. I can tell the sound of a guitar from the sound of a bass, and I am thankful for that, but no I cannot hear the difference in warmth. I wish I could.

The best way to listen to music is however you listen to music.

I listen to records because I’ve always listened to records, and because it means trips to the record store, which means flipping through bins, pulling out records that have sat in sleeves for over 30 years, which unleashes 30 years of stale cigarette smoke into the air. This is not a thing I’d wish on anybody. But records have been a throughline in my life. From 3rd Street Jazz in Philadelphia to Stranded in San Francisco, to Tiger Records in Oslo that specializes in jazz that feels cold, to the giant Tower Records that still exists in Tokyo, to all the record stores around the world I’ve been lucky enough to visit just that one time, my life has been measured in records, each one invoking a memory. A time machine. A reminder of a time, or a person I spent that time with, moods both good and bad, all of that shit is embedded in those grooves. A short stack of memories brought back with great care from distant cities. A few records brought back from a lazy Sunday walk that also included pinball and a slice of pizza.

For me, the record store has always been a center of community. Yes, there are a bunch of other ways to listen to a record you want to listen to, but none of them come with a trip to the record store. A reason to walk out of the house, walk through your neighborhood, possibly take a bus to a different neighborhood, and walk into a place where you can just hang out, and talk to people about a thing that you have in common. Again, you may have your own type of place that does this exact same thing for you and that’s great. I love that for you. Those places, whatever that place may be for you—bookstore, dog park, ceramic studio, hardware store, bakery, union hall—are so important to have in our lives at all ages. They get us out of the house. They get us to talk to strangers. They get us to try unfamiliar things. (I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard something new at a record store and walked out with that record in hand.) They get us outside of the house and interacting with our neighbors.

At the same time, I’m acutely aware that one of the reasons record stores have always felt so welcome to me is because I’m a white guy who tends to like the same kind of music that the prototypical white guy record store clerk also enjoys. (Insert Yo La Tengo joke here.) Although, this is something I’ve seen some progress in as well. The snobby clerks we might remember from the High Fidelity movie are thankfully fading away, being replaced by a more diverse, welcoming clerk that is happy to sell you the new whatever-it-is-that-stirs-your-drink record. As it should be.

Record stores should be a welcoming place to anyone, and you belong in every room you walk into.

In another life—which way well get grafted onto the current one before it’s all said and done—you will find me as the clerk in my own record store. I’ve got it all planned out. Every month I’ll sell twelve different records. (Lots of copies of each one.) Across genres, some brand new, some from the past. They’ll all be picked by me, with lots of input from friends. They won’t be categorized in any way. Just a wall showing our twelve selections for the month. You’ll walk in, sit down on the couch, I’ll make coffee, and you can point to any record on the wall and I’ll put it on. We can sit there in silence, or we can have a conversation if you want. Of the twelve, you will find one you like. Come back next month and there will be twelve different records. You will always be welcome, I will always be happy to play music for you.

I will try very hard to find something that you can take home, hopefully along with a memory of a neighbor that made you feel welcome.

Mike Monteiro is an immigrant living with his family in San Francisco. He lives in constant fear of being evicted from their home so it can be rented out to some tech dickhead at four times the price, getting run over by a driverless car while on his bike, and being arrested by masked thugs.

In between those things, he enjoys a donut. He’s written a smattering of books including Design Is a Job, Ruined by Design, The Collected Angers, and Sofa Stories (with Betsy Streeter).

A couple of years ago, while dealing with post-covid writer’s block he started asking people to send him questions to answer on his newsletter. Which he still does once a week. His new book is a curated anthology of those answers.

He’s a designer by trade but mostly spends his time painting, writing, and washing dishes these days. He wishes the apocalypse was faster. Or just canceled outright, really. But this?! This is exhausting.

He wants you to protect trans kids. Go Birds. Fuck ICE. Free Palestine.