Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, record stores championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. Record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art.This book takes a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musi...

Released in the U.S. in January 1968, The Who Sell Out was, according to critic Dave Marsh, a complete backfire--the album sold well, but not spectacularly [and was] ultimately a nostalgic in-joke: Who but a pop intellectual could appreciate such a thing? Further rarifying its in-joke status was its unapologetic Englishness; 13 tracks stitched together in a mock pirate radio broadcast, without a DJ, with cool, anglocentric commercials to boot. In the 36 years since its release,

Released in the U.S. in January 1968, The Who Sell Out was, according to critic Dave Marsh, a complete backfire--the album sold well, but not spectacularly [and was] ultimately a nostalgic in-joke: Who but a pop intellectual could appreciate such a thing? Further rarifying its in-joke status was its unapologetic Englishness; 13 tracks stitched together in a mock pirate radio broadcast, without a DJ, with cool, anglocentric commercials to boot. In the 36 years since its release, Sell Out, t...