The Guardian: “‘People in their 40s were crying’: the sad final days of New York's coolest record store”

Si Hawkins writes about New York’s Other Music record store, and the recent documentary about its closure:

Two decades on, I am reminiscing over Zoom with the makers of the film, Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller, who are now based in Los Angeles, but were once Other regulars. The latter worked there, between 2002 and 2005, which was quite a leap from his early forays into the store. “One of the first times I ever asked someone in the store for something, I was terrified, like, shaking,” he admits. Basu agrees: “It was extra scary, because it was tiny. You would walk in and everybody would look up.”

This brings back so many sense memories. I spent a lot of time (and money) bouncing between Other Music, Tower Records, and a handful of other record stores between that NoHo/East Village neighborhood and Union Square. I never really experienced the intimidation factor that Hawkins describes, though. Perhaps I was shielded by the dense fog of my own pretentions.