Pretentious Record Store Blog

How many times have you found yourself trapped on a broken down bus going nowhere fast, completely surrounded by a smörgåsbord of the craziest freaks, geeks, weirdos, aliens, robots, cavemen, megalomaniacal midgets, dinosaurs, buddy cops, giant mutant monsters, dysfunctional couples, depressed artists, ninjas for hire, poli-sci majors, sit down comics and one messed up kid with a head full of LSD and only Jesus and His pet goat to help him through his trip?

If you have, then it’s just another Tuesday in your so called life. Congratulations, friend, that means that you’re already a big Freak!

If you have never had the luxury to find yourself in such a position, then it’s about time for you to expand your horizons a bit and venture outside your comfortable little sphere of normalcy; it’s time for you to experience first hand the depravity, humility, misadventures and downright oddness of how the other half lives!

So what are you waiting for: tune in, turn on and join the parade… Purchase the limited edition Parade of Freaks WizardWorldChicago Special now at IndyPlanet.com.

The Parade of Freaks/Pretentious Record Store Guy is hitting the road, folks! June 27th-29th we setting up shop at Wizard World Chicago. We are extremely excited since this is our first official convention outing. We will also have the very first issue of Pretentious Record Store Guy miniseries for sale as well as the Wizard World Parade of Freaks Special Edition which has the much anticipated Agent of C.H.A.N.G.E. 5 page story as a bonus. It’s going to be amazing and we can’t wait to see you there. So if you’re in Chicago and are attending WizardWorld, come look me up. Enjoy.

In order to fully submerse yourself in the world of Pretentious Record Store Guy, it helps to know the lingo. To help out all those wannabe hucksters, hipsters and scenesters, we here at Pretentious Record Store Guy have decided to educate the coalition of the willing in the vernacular of PRSG. Enjoy.

Pretentious - characterized by assumption of dignity or importance
Pretentious Record Store Guy - most every record store employee, our protagonist
Hipster - a person characterized by a particularly strong sense of disdain and alienation from the mainstream and a real affinity for the cutting edge and/or independent; a person in the know.
Scenester - a person always involved with a particular scene, mainly to be seen
Fashionista - a person who always on the cutting edge of fashion and style and flaunts their knowhow
Phil Collins - drummer, singer/songwriter, 80s pop icon and mortal enemy of Pretentious Record Store Guy.
Retro - of or designating the style of an earlier time
Indie - Independent music
The Heat - slang for something that is so amazingly good it goes beyond being “hot” and becomes
Emo - emotional music characterized best by whiny, adolescent lyrics and heart on the sleeve junior high school poetry a la Sunny Day Real Estate and Dashboard Confessional
Hipster Battle - a contest of wits in regards to who is the most in the know
Triple T Hipster BaTTTle - an extreme Hipster Battle sort of like a XXX rating for the hipsters
Rock Band Central - the staging point for all rock bands
Digg - the act of promoting something online
Andrew Wood - The Jesus Christ of Grunge
Bleed the Blood of the Dying - A post-emo-core band with slight math core influences
Gospel Music - the word in music, home of Pretentious Record Store Guy

Every journey has a beginning, every story has a start and every record store has a Pretentious Record Store Guy. This is his story!

When you’re Pretentious Record Store Guy, you’re life is pretty much made in the shade right? You get to see all the cool shows, pick through all the good music and take home all the latest promos. Life is pretty good, right? A pretentious existential crisis, with jokes about music.

The key to being in a scene is to be seen, and nowhere is more important than in a record store, where the employees are cooler than you and know every big band a year before anyone else does; welcome to the world of Pretentious Record Store Guy.

You’ve seen his adventures monthly in the pages of Playback:STL and online at pretentiousrecordstoreguy.com and now Pretentious Record Store Guy is going on his biggest journey yet. Issue #1 of the epic Pretentious Record Store Guy story hits the web like underground single from your favorite band, only instead of being sonic delicious goodness for your ear holes it’s music for your eyes and your cerebral cortex. If you have never read any Pretentious Record Store Guy comic, than do yourself a favor and read the first 10 pages for free at the Pretentious Record Store Guy website.

It’s a Hipster BaTTTle happening (3Ts like XXX only TTT)!!!

Available now at IndyPlanet: http://www.indyplanet.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1076

If youre like me then youre 510, rail thin, ridiculously good looking and your hair is the elixir from which dreams are made. Youre also a pretentious music fan, an aficionado of the underground, the litmus test by which any band who is anyone will be judged and blogged by before their fist single even makes it to a mall to be sold at Sam Goody and purchased by know-nothings who will only buy whatever Rolling Stone, Spin or A.P. advertisers steer them towards. We are the taste makers that serve up our sacrificial lambs to the mainstream so that they can die and be be resurrected in the temple of rock.

You might even watch The O.C., which brings me to my point or rather to the question which I pose herein:

If an Indie band sold out on The O.C. would there be any hipsters left to watch?

More and more every concert I go to is being populated by a litany of teens and preteens. I now find myself having to navigate the narrows of the pit with sinewy, gawky, thirteen year olds who are all elbows, while their parents stand three feet behind me staring at me, silently judging me, while I drink my intoxicants and smoke my Camel lights. This has seriously begun to dampen my joy for the live show, a staple of my pretentious existence.

While I cannot hold this against the young, for we were all once preteen unpretentious music lovers at one time or another before we became schooled in rock, I do hold one man personally responsible. That man is Seth Cohen.

Fuck Seth Cohen!

Seth Cohen has ruined my life! He has taken the one thing in the world that I hold dear and prostituted it for the world to take turns with and discard after their momentary desire is satisfied. He has taken a great many of my favorite Indie bands and served them up for the mainstream masses to suckle upon their teat. And, oh how every band is lining up for their turn to bare their breasts!

Now I am all for spreading the word and getting great music heard, but at the same time music is the one thing, the only thing that I care about. Discovering a band is a very special thing. Getting in on the ground floor, being one of the first people at the concert who knows all the songs, meeting the band after the show and helping spread the word through the underground is an unequaled experience. When a band finally breaks the mainstream you feel some sort of satisfaction in knowing that you did your part to help them along the way; they will always be your own little special band.

Not anymore. Every Thursday Seth Cohen and The O.C. would break my heart each week while serving up another one of my favorite bands to be gorged and devoured by mainstream America, a trend that has been taken up by Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl and a plethora of other shows. I for one am glad that The O.C. was canceled because it serves as proof that there is a higher intelligence out there in the universe.

And each passing week I feel a little bit sadder and a little bit older and a little bit more meaningless.

Thanks, Seth Cohen.

If I could ever meet Seth Cohen this is what I would say, “Go fuck yourself very much. Douche.”

Happy 4-20! To celebrate you should go to a record store. And you shouldn’t go to any old record store, but an independent record store filled with Pretentious Record Store Guys like me. Seriously, why go to a mall and pay $20 to buy from a pimple faced high schooler with a smock when you can go to an indy record store and pick up something for $18 from a 34 year old college dropout.

Yesterday wasn’t just a song by The Beatles, but it was also Record Store Day (4-19). Even though you’re a day late and a dollar short, you should follow the most pretentious of pretentious music magazines guide to celebrating the festivities. So, without further ado, here is Pitchfork’s Guide to Record Store Day.

Vinyl is way better than CD.  When you listen to a record it’s warmer and has much more body than a CD, causing it to sound much fuller.  It’s like a nice, fine wine as opposed to a boxed pink wine.

Whether or not you spin the black circle you can at least admit it to yourself, Ted, that MP3s are violent.

But it’s not just MP3s, but CDs that started this trend and the number one reason for this is Steve Jobs.  That’s right, Mr. Digital Music, Appleman himself has led to the decline of music with Apple’s ProTools.

Nick Levine wrote a fantastic piece about it entitled “The Death of High Fidelity”.  Click on the link and get some knowledge for yourself.

As for me, I’m always in the know; I’ve always been an analog baby.

Viva la Vinyl!

Next Tuesday Feb. 5th is Super Tuesday, so the Parade of Freaks wanted to remind everyone to go out and vote in the primaries.

Who has won the Parade’s admiration and vote this season? Why, none other than Mr. Barack Obama. Why? Because he is an Agent of C.H.A.N.G.E. What is C.H.A.N.G.E.? Change is Citizens Helping America’s New Government Effort. Government is broken and only C.H.A.N.G.E. can fix it.

To enable C.H.A.N.G.E. we must Vote for Barack Obama for President!

This illustration was inspired by the great Jim Steranko, the leadership of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and is powered by H.O.P.E.

Enjoy.

What did you do today?

I listened to The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs in its entirety (Stephin Merritt should win a Nobel Peace Prize or something) on vinyl while drinking a Starbucks Caramel Frappacino and then, because all my fans demanded it, I came up with 50 All New Cool Band Names. I would have had the whole afternoon to bask in my glory but I had to close the record store and deal with people like you all night long.

What? Not everyone is born rich; some of us have to work menial laborious jobs until the world finally recognizes our utter genius.

Luckily, I dont have a menial laborious job: I work at a record store. Kind of makes you wonder why you spent all your parents money to go to college only to get a job that you despise. (Thats why when I thought of going to college I dropped acid instead and thought about cool band names that I could eventually call my band whenever I got around to learning how to play the guitar my mom bought me for my 13^th birthday. BTW, I just finished learning all the chords last year, so watch out world!)

Back to the point at hand, here we go– Pretentious Record Store Guys 50 All New Cool Band Names I Came Up With Today.

The Wholigans, Ty Died, If You Reap What You Sow Then Death Has Surely Got It Coming, Fine Whine (an emo band), White Swallow, Death From Dying, United Parcel Service, The Downs, Hermaphrodite Love Child, The Boxers Bat, Suicide By Cop, The On Deck Circle Jerks, Dazed and Misued, Sue Me, The Imp Pencils, The Porno Graffiti, Lakeside Quartet, The Legal Department, Male Room, SmokeFireBurntSienna, Calamity Jane Doe, Ibuprofen, The Jesse James Gang Bang Band, Sex, The Flasks, Alaska Is So Much Nicer In the Summer, August Cowboys, Serenity Now, The House Fire, A Forrest, Dee Mentioned, 13th Level Elfin Wizard, The Love Cats, Demon Slayer, Rest Assured, Dr. Scholl You Call Yourself a Doctor But You Couldn’t Heel Me, You Are the One (Who is the Liar?), Mercy Boo Coup, The George Washington Junior High School Fencing Team Tryouts, Sonic Boom Boom, Out of Touch (Out of Time), The Deals, The Fashionistas, The Christopher Columbus Day Experiment, The Co-Pathetics, South By Southfist, Satan Has 8 Cocks And All of Them Are Evil, The Runners, Dying Machine, Tripping Acid In A Crowded Tent Isnt Really As Fun As It Sounds, Maybe I Should Have Gone to College…

And the number one band name is The Snake Gang–my all new side project that is a down and dirty, country roots, rock band. I just come up with it today and it still deserves a place at the top of the pantheon of today’s names because of its’ so tough it makes Marlon Brando come back to life only to wet himself and run back to his eternal resting place whimpering about how he could have been someone.