Okay, last one of these for a while ... I promise.
A reader recently wrote in response to my vanished-record-store-round-up from a little while back. Arem wrote:
I know they are out of your areas of musical interest, but there were loads of independent hip-hop, dance, and reggae record stores back in the day that have vanished as well. RIP to Fat Beats, Beat Street, Breakbeat Science, Sound Library, Eightball Records, Dance Tracks, Heartbeat Records, Jammyland, Dub Spot, Coxsone's Music City and many others I'm forgetting.
Well, as I cited in this first follow-up, my little rundown was by no means an authoritatively complete list, and as Arem correctly asserts, my list was largely confined to my own areas of interest (i.e. that which rawks). He’s right, though, there’s been a load of shops that specialized in jazz, dance music and hip-hop and reggae that have gone the way of all flesh. I did indeed stop in fairly routinely at Eightball on East 9th street (now a Korean restaurant), and bought a bunch of flight cases for my vinyl there. And I did write a fleeting eulogy to Fat Beats off West 8th Street (pictured above).
I stopped into Jammyland once or twice, but I’m a total reggae dilettante. Jammyland, of course, later turned into the hive of black metal that was Hospital Productions, but that's gone now too. I never set foot in Dance Trax, alas.
I’ll say this, though: If you’re a fan of dance music and hip hop, you should get yourself to Rock & Soul (pictured beneath from god knows when). Not a lot of my type of crap, but an impressive sprawl otherwise, and amazingly still there (on 35th street on 7th Avenue).
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