Could this be your secret shame?

I stopped in at my local record store the other day and got a pleasant surprise: someone, presumably itching for a little spending cash, had dropped off three or four crates of used records -- mostly twelve-inch singles, mostly released between 1980 and 1990. I don't know who this guy was, but he seems to have bought a lot of the same things I did back then -- and, more to the point, a lot of the things that I talked myself out of buying.

Before we go any further, we should probably stop for a shot of historical perspective. If your memories of the 1980s involve learning to walk rather than learning to drive, if vinyl records have always been a retro-style novelty to you, and if you can't remember a time when "electronica" (not that anyone called it that at the time) was scary, frightening, underground stuff, unsuited for mainstream dance floors, you may not realize that "club music" wasn't always a viable proposition on its own. Twenty years ago, the songs at the top of the Billboard pop chart routinely made a play for the dance charts. Any single worth its stripes was issued as an extended twelve-inch version, regardless of the danceability of the initial tune: slow songs were sped up, meandering tracks acquired urgent beats, acoustic tunes gained burbling keyboard accents, and so forth. Songs that were banal at three and a half minutes long were expanded to a near-unbearable six; utterly undanceable tracks acquired enough "additional production" to leave them entirely unrecognizable. And sometimes, if the remix was inventive enough, the ploy actually worked, landing acts like Afro-popster Mory Kanté in the wholly incongruous environs of the Billboard dance charts. Everyone got extended dance mixes -- U2, Quiet Riot, Yanni, Ofra Haza, you name it. And don't even get me started on the inevitable B-side "dub" versions; that's a horror for another day.

So anyway, this guy didn't have any of the really heinous stuff in his collection -- or if he did, he knew better than to try to sell it -- but he had a lot of stuff that no-one, save for a college radio or nightclub DJ circa 1987, would have any reason to own. To begin with, we're talking about the largest collection of questionable Kid Creole and the Coconuts dance mixes I've ever seen in one place (not that I've gone looking; Kid Creole himself probably owns more of them). Then there's the scarily broad assortment of Enigma Records promo twelve-inches -- Red Flag, SSQ and so forth. And when you find an SSQ 12", you're almost certain to find -- yep, there it is -- a copy of Company B's "Fascinated", as guilty a guilty synthpop pleasure as ever there was.

These were all things that I, in my college radio days, had the opportunity to acquire gratis but politely declined; there was never any problem getting Enigma to send extra copies of a Red Flag record, and little or no problem with half-inching the station's copy, if you wanted it, as they weren't in demand, airplay-wise. I can even remember trying gamely to fit a few of them into my DJ sets, circa 1989, but they simply didn't fly. Even so, I was stuck with a weird urge to jump at this second chance at ownership -- to snap them up, take them home and revel in the sordid pleasure of their wrongness. I didn't, though. It occurred to me that once I'd taken them home, I'd be burdened with them forever, my sanctity for all things vinyl-based making it impossible to throw them away, and giving them to an eager newbie record collector, desperate for any and all vinyl, was just plain cruel.

There was other stuff, too. An implausibly large number of Flesh For Lulu singles -- including, inevitably, "I Go Crazy" (I have mixed feelings about this track; I hate it, frankly, but it was the commercial impetus behind the tour spawned by John Hughes's Some Kind of Wonderful, which gave me my only chance to see The March Violets before they broke up), but also a Beggars Banquet two-track promo of the infinitely more tolerable late-period rocker "Decline and Fall". There were Aztec Camera twelve-inches, Icehouse twelve-inches, Eurythmics twelve-inches, Ultravox twelve-inches... all those essential eighties building blocks. There were a bunch of Front 242 twelve-inches, all of which I had, and a bundle of Nettwerk Records promos -- Moev, Severed Heads -- again mostly stuff I owned. The extended mix of Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance". The horrible extended mix of The Nails' "88 Lines about 44 Women", worth $20 in better condition. And others... including many items that "common sense" dictated I should buy just because they were there, and in all likelihood dirt cheap.

The scary thing is how quickly the era came back to me as I browsed through the crates -- how easily I recognized Enigma and Virgin twelve-inches by their generic sleeve design, Wax Trax promos by the cut corners, and Nettwerk promos, alarmingly, by the font used on the sleeve-spine. And eventually, my familiarity with these crates of vinyl led me to a scary question:

Was my own music collection this frivolous? Could I pull a four foot-high stack of promotional tripe out of my crates?

Make no mistake, I've got some serious rarities stored in the walk-in closet that holds most of my vinyl, and a healthy bedrock of obscure goodies that routinely trade in the $25 to $50 range, but what about the building blocks? Am I quietly harboring a (very) small fortune in unloved dance mixes? How about third-string ambient acts? Faceless SoCal punkers? Britpop also-rans? Emo rarities that, like most collectors' plates, will actually decrease in value?

I'm not saying that, say, blithely saving the 12" mix of Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy" from the landfill should earn you a spot in hell, but there's something about discovering the abiding naffness of something you were once proud of -- for example, reading a short story that won awards when you were in college, but which, in the harsh light of your modern-day standards, turns out to be utter shit -- that can really undermine your faith in Now.

Suitably cautioned, I replaced the majority of the sizable stack of records I'd pulled from the crates, gradually purging the pile of frivolous nostalgia. The remaining records I put aside, determined to sleep on the decision, quietly hoping they wouldn't be there when I returned.

Then, driving home, I popped the LCD Soundsystem album into the player and realized that I was already fucked.

-- George Zahora