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Business News Retail
Iggy Pop named as ambassador for Record Store Day
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 24 January 2012
Organisers of the Record Store Day festivities worldwide have announced that Iggy Pop will be this year’s Ambassador for the annual celebration of the independent record shop.
Officially giving his support to Record Store Day, indie record shops everywhere, and the very concept of the physical world, Pop said in a statement: “A person should have a personality. You won’t get one dicking around on a computer. It helps to go somewhere where there are other persons. Persons who are interested in something you are. That’s how a record store, or any shop that’s got some life to it, should work. It’s not about selling shit”.
He continues: “I got my name, my musical education and my personality all from working at a record store during my tender years. Small indie shops have always been a mix of theatre and laboratory. In the 50s and 60s the teen kids used to gather after school at these places to listen free to the latest singles and see if they liked the beat. You could buy the disc you liked for 79 cents and if you were lucky meet a chick. Clerks in these places became managers (like Brian Epstein), label heads (Jack Holzman) and faces on album covers (like me)”.
“Personally I feel best in a store that, while staying small and socially relaxed, still keeps a complete variety of music types and non-musical recordings on offer. I’m aware though that a lot of great places are genre-specific, like dancehall shops in Jamaica, or Compas here in Little Haiti. In Europe and on the West Coast the same goes on for punk and goth”.
“All of this is cool and has a much bigger future than most people realise today. When the [big] record and record store businesses began to die at the turn of the new century, they deserved it because they got too big, too boring and too plastic. As Record Store Day Ambassador for 2012 I feel like a representative from some exotic jungle full of life and death and sex and anger, called upon to wear a leopard skin and translate joy to the world of the dead”.
More at www.recordstoreday.com
