Step in Hot Poop (and Buy a CD)

How a trip to a music store in Washington State's wine country got me thinking about the future of music

Behold! Thousands of of compact discs in shiny packaging, white and yellowed placards with the names of well-known bands in alphabetical order scrawled in sharpie — Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Springsteen — and lesser known acts filed between them. A glittering paradise of images and potential sounds that seem to float through the dry air.

In some ways, the experience of rifling through CD’s is like scrolling through Instagram. There are images after images. There’s intrigue, mystery, moments of familiarity, and a sense that one person could simply never experience it all. But there are important differences. Despite the overwhelming amount of music on display and for sale, there’s a finite beginning and an end to this experience. Unlike searching the literally endless possibilities of the virtual world and unlike the infinite suspension of commitment that music streaming services and social media sites provide, in the “brick-and-mortar” music store, I will enter, search, find, and ultimately live with a decision. I will commit. And when I leave the music store, I will commit again to leaving the experience of discovery and commitment behind, at least for now. The music store is a container for that experience. The music store is a place, a real place where through our hands eyes and ears our physical bodies may be briefly connected with our emotional and intellectual need for music. A site.

If you’re old enough you may have shopped at a store like this: Tower Records, Sam Goody, Best Buy or a mom-and-pop place. Where I grew up in Middletown, Ohio we had a store called CD Connection. I spent about $20 a week on music there. There are very few record stores left these days, so I was surprised to discover Hot Poop.

Yes, Hot Poop is the name of an actual music store nestled in the downtown of Walla Walla, Washington. And yes, Walla Walla is the name of a real town — the Nez Perce name given to a group of Native Americans who lived in that particular valley. Now on that native land is a community of preppy retirees, old hippies, college students studying at Whitman College, and native peoples still. There’s a candy store, a toy store, a burger joint and more. And so, for someone like me who grew up in the hollowed out towns of the rust belt, strolling through downtown Walla Walla and then entering Hot Poop is not unlike traveling back in time. Let me tell you about my experience in an effort to convince you to visit a CD store.

“You’ve just stepped in Hot Poop!” a clerk exclaimed, as my eyes adjusted from the bright sun to the dimmer shop lights. Immediately there’s the clutter and smell of plastic, vinyl, cotton tee-shirts, vintage guitars and electronics. There is music, in all its physical reality and timeless glory. Stepping through the door I felt like a character in Apple TV’s new show Severance — here was another version of reality, perhaps another version of me wandering an alternate universe where music streaming never happened and contemporary artists like Taylor Swift are on the shelves right there somewhere between Aerosmith and ZZ Top. I wandered, backtracked, pondered, as one does in a store. Then I saw the listening stations.

If you’re under thirty five you may never have used a “listening station”. Let me explain. At a listening station patrons in CD stores are free to use headphones to preview new albums. Hot Poop has several stations, each with the requisite coil cable and over-the-ear industrial strength headphones, a selection of five to ten CD’s, and a small device used to select the disc and track. As a dutiful and experienced music consumer interested in new music I headed to one such station and listened to a few new artists as if it were 1998.

As I listened to songs on the CD’s I attempted (unsuccessfully) to resist concurrently using my iPhone to read Google search results and Spotify artist biographies. Despite wrestling with the familiar pull of the internet on my smartphone, the limited selection of CD’s and the sense of deliberate curation offered a kind of freedom I hadn’t felt in a while. I put my phone away and my bifurcated consciousness snapped back into a sense of fullness.

There’s no infinite scroll or infinite choice. There’s curation by real human beings who have put these particular albums into the machine for me to consider. If I could not trust the staff of this music store — staff who are paid to think about and sell music — to make informed choices about the quality of music, who could I trust? I skipped through a few albums that didn’t do much for me until finally I came across a band called The Blue Stones. Straightforward, powerful pentatonic rock with fresh sounding mixes and flourishes of contemporary production? Yes! My interest was piqued.

I clicked through the latest album from the Blue Stones to listen to a few more tracks. The intro track and several arty intermissions featuring the sound of subway station announcements seemed designed take the listener on a sonic journey, and the album title Metro backed this up. So here it is. This is an album. Not a random atomized collection of songs on some robot-curated playlist. This is a body of work. A work of human art, ordered in a particular way for me, the listener. An experience. I took the CD to the counter and purchased it.

To some of you, this experience will sound so commonplace as to be quotidian or unremarkable. But it has been years since I’ve purchased a CD, and many people never have. That was a couple weeks ago. And because my car is from 2015 and has a CD player, the album Metro by The Blue Stones has been on repeat for a couple weeks. I don’t have to fumble with my phone when I get in the car. It just rips. CD’s sound better than streaming, too. The way the sound from a CD hits the car amplifier is still unmatched. Bluetooth be damned.

I haven’t thought deeply about my own music consumption habits in a while. But a conversation around this is bubbling up again. There has been a steady devaluation of music in the last few decades and many people believe we are now at a cultural low point for music. For years I’ve been reading Ted Gioia, the music expert and cultural critic, who has noted that major labels now invest more in acquiring back catalogs than developing new artists. Spencer Kornhaber from The Atlantic has written compellingly about streaming algorithms favoring familiar sounds and nostalgia-driven playlists. All of this creates a feedback loop that further entrenches older music. Gioa, Kornhaber (and most recently Derek Thompson) argue that this isn’t just people over 30 or 40 complaining as old people tend to do. This is observable reality.

Physical spaces dedicated to the exhibition, performance, or sale of works of art will not solve all these problems. But they can help. Music stores are now in a way like cultural repositories or museums — places where physical media and musical heritage are preserved against the tide of digital ephemerality. Which is why, perhaps, I felt so invigorated by having success discovering a new artist in Hot Poop.

If you’ve read this far, you likely know that I had a mildly successful career as a songwriter fronting a band July For Kings. In the 90’s we sold CD’s out of our cars. In the 2000’s we sold CD’s online. By 2010 most sales were downloads through iTunes. That year, I traveled to perform an acoustic show in Amsterdam. I stayed that night with a couple fans who worked in the music industry. I’ll never forget seeing the Spotify interface for the first time (Spotify started in Sweeden and had just come online in nearby Holland). The three of us ate green curry in a small apartment and huddled around a laptop in amazement; this is too good to be true, we felt.

The following year Spotify was introduced in the United States. Although the labels fought it at first, the writing was on the wall — it was too good to be true. These days, a song is worth about $0.003 to $0.005 per stream on Spotify. That’s what goes to the artist. In pure economic terms music has become worthless. A pragmatist might say music is created now mostly to sell concert tickets, tee-shirts, and other items that might have slightly larger profit margins.

But this isn’t really about some hypothetical economic pragmatist or me and my years-old music industry grievances. Nor it is about nostalgia, necessarily. The experience I had at Hot Poop is about wholeness (words that likely have never appeared in the same sentence!). Walking through a physical space, handling tangible objects, making choices within thoughtful constraints, and committing to a relationship with art and artist is fundamentally different from the frictionless interactions of the digital age.

As someone deeply interested in technology I would not suggest that we discard technology wholesale, but rather that we recognize what is worth preserving as we move forward: spaces where discovery rooted in an embodied experience are encouraged and fostered, where commitment precedes consumption, and where art remains anchored in the random little towns like Middletown, OH or Walla Walla, WA that help to nurture and sustain it.

This is personal for me. I witnessed the collapse of the music industry firsthand as a songwriter. Today, with my life more focused on visual arts and arts education I often notice troubling parallels. Images are delivered now in rapid fire on our three-inch screens, making a trip to an art gallery seem like an unnecessary inconvenience. And while a lot of great arts educators have taken to YouTube, there’s still something so special about being in the physical presence of a teacher. There’s something to the smell of oil paint, of old books, the buzz of electronics. I’ve spent my life in these space, from sweaty stages with July For Kings to the painting studio on the seventh floor where I spend many of my days now. And I wouldn’t trade any of it.

But like everyone else, I occasionally feel disembodied. I am making a more active attempt to put myself back together through physical experiences both as an artist and as a consumer, as a fan. And while I wrote this to share my newfound love of both Hot Poop the music store and of the Canadian pentatonic rock duo The Blue Stones (and to see if maybe anyone can babysit my son so I can drive eight hours to see them on tour in a couple weeks? Ha!), I’ll end with a simple call to action.

Do you know of one of these spaces? This could be a record store, a book shop or gallery. Go there and allow yourself the time and liberation that these parameters provide. Commit to discovering something that might grow on you through repeated encounters. Approach this not as a retreat into the dusty past but as a meditation on what the future of the arts might and should look like. With luck you can conjure an experience that connects the best parts of the past with contemporary art and culture — and with that part of yourself that can only be made whole through the profound gift of human creativity.