Exit, Pursued by a Hot Topic Clerk
Good morning, readers! It feels really good to be cranking out more than one newsletter in the same month again! I want to give a very special welcome to the new readers who joined up after my piece about Robin/Tim Drake coming out, cause I was really excited about that one and appreciate the validation! To my new subscribers that I don’t know personally, I’m extremely curious to learn how you found my newsletter, what made you decide to sign up, and what kind of pieces you’d like to see more of from me; if you want, please reply back to this email to let me know! No obligation, I’m grateful for you no matter what, but I’m always looking for ways to better promote this newsletter and hone in on what my readers are interested in!
Anyway, in the meantime, here’s a story about the first CD I ever bought at a store with my own money, which ended up actually being a story about my screwed up relationship with my parents oh god:
There’s a lot of good music out there, but most of us don't tend to fall in love with songs or bands or musicians because they’re objectively “good” — they become such an important part of our lives because they speak to us in some way, strike some kind of chord with us, become a part of us. I grew up listening to 90s-era country (before 9/11 and Toby Keith ruined the genre), liked quite a bit of it, and still have a lot of fondness for those songs, but I didn’t stick with it because it never felt like it was “mine.” It was music my parents listened to, and I heard while I was in the car with them. I didn’t discover it on my own. I never saw myself in any of the songs. I couldn’t talk about it with friends or classmates. I never sought it out on my own or owned any of the albums.
Compare and contrast with the first time I heard “Closing Time” by Semisonic on the radio, while flipping through the stations sitting in my dad’s car waiting for him to get done grocery shopping in middle school. It was the first time I ever felt that immediate “click” of something that felt like it had been made just for me. It lit a fire in my gut. It made me want to find more music like it, to start paying attention to band names and genres. It made me want to own music so I could listen to it over and over1. It changed me.
Getting into music as a teenager wasn’t easy. My parents had made a very deliberate decision to raise me on country music because it was a “safe” choice, something they could let me listen to with a clear conscience without me hearing a bunch of cursing or smut or whatever else they feared was in the more popular musical offerings of the era (and even country was sometimes too much for them — I’ve never seen my mom move more quickly in my life than she would to change the station whenever “They Think My Tractor’s Sexy” started playing). Forging my own taste in music wasn’t just a bit of a personal affront to them; it was something that put me under intense scrutiny and judgment.
So it was, like most things in my life, something that had to be done behind their back.
Further complicating matters were the facts that, at the time, I had neither the internet nor a job, and I needed at least one in order to get new music. The former I wanted desperately; the latter, not so much. My family, strangely enough, didn’t want me to have a job; my dad always said that once you started working, you’ll have to work for the rest of your life, so you should wait as long as possible to start (Hidden in that message is the assumption that all jobs and, in fact, working in general, are awful, an idea that has likely been messing me up most of my life). To me, the idea of spending all day in school then giving up even more of my precious personal time to go work a job felt like absolute torture. Sure, I would have liked to have been able to buy CDs with money I earned at work, but I guess I didn’t want it quite enough to get a job, or to fight with my parents about getting a job. The latter may have been the real problem, as always; getting a job would have been a fight, getting to the job they didn’t want me to have would have been a fight, being able to actually go anywhere to spend my money would have been a fight, anything I bought would have been scrutinized, and I’ve always, always ran from confrontation.
The first few CDs I owned ended up being mix compilations my friends at school would burn me via glitchy, often incorrect songs downloaded off Limewire and Kazaa2. Actually buying a CD from a store with my own money for the first time, to no one’s surprise, ended up being an ordeal.
I’ll take this moment to mention that my family didn’t know at this point that I’d branched out on my own little personal musical journey. I’d snuck those Mix CDs into the house, listening to them on the ancient Windows 3.1 computer I had in my bedroom to type my homework on. Every morning I’d sneak into the cabinet in the dining room where my parents kept the Discman player they’d bought to listen to their CDs in the car (via tape deck adaptor) and use it to listen to my CDs on the bus; every afternoon I’d sneak it back into the cabinet before they’d notice it was gone. It was like my own little Oceans 11 heist, twice a day, five days a week.
So anyway, one day a friend is hanging out at my house, and another friend a year older than us, a friend my parents trust, a friend with a car, offers to take us to the mall. I think it may have actually been the very first time I’d ever been to the mall without an “adult” with us, which, given that I was in either tenth or eleventh grade at this point, was really sad. It’s been long enough that I can’t remember if this trip was planned or spontaneous, but either way I know that I had a goal that day: I was going to buy the Punisher soundtrack on CD.
This was, of course, the soundtrack to the 2004 Punisher film starring Thomas Jane. Despite it being a superhero movie, I don’t think I actually had any interest in seeing Punisher, and actually didn’t see it until close to a decade later (it was okay!). Given that it was 2004, the soundtrack was full of era-appropriate nu-metal, and the quintessentially 2004 song that made this a must-have album for me was “Broken,” by Seether featuring Amy Lee of Evanescence.
In writing this piece I listened to this song for the first time in a decade, and surprisingly, I think it mostly holds up? It’s not the kind of song I’d be so obsessed with that I’d run out to buy a copy behind my parents’ back anymore — and Seether never did much for me on their own at any point — but Amy Lee just really makes this something worth listening to. When the harmonies kicked in I was struck for a moment; when the strings started I was able to remember why I was once so captivated by this. Say what you will about the mainstream Gothiness of Evanescence — I certainly didn't keep up with them after my brief high school obsession — but Lee has a gorgeous voice and an absolutely killer set of pipes, and 2004 Spencer could have picked a far worse song to be obsessed with (god, could you imagine if my first CD had been Puddle of Mudd or something?).
(Okay, on my first editing pass of this piece I was going to remove the Puddle of Mudd joke for being a little too mean/easy, but then I pulled up the Punisher soundtrack on Wikipedia and was graced with the fact that there actually was a Puddle of Mudd song on the album, so now I’m leaving it in to mock me instead. I have, once again, flown too close to the sun.)
So what we had here was a trifecta of parental disapproval: buying my own music, that was a soundtrack to a R-Rated movie about a murderous vigilante, featuring lots of “creepy” “goth” music (my mom once saw the cover to an Evanescence album while flipping through a diner jukebox and audibly gasped like some kind of Southern Belle). What should have been a simple transaction became a terrifying mission, where I was afraid I’d be seen with the CD and it would get reported back to my parents, and scared to be caught with it later. I was probably shaking the entire time I was at the mall.
My journey eventually took us to Hot Topic, but for this to make any sense, I need you all to travel back in time with me to 2004. Forget that the Hot Topic of today has become a Funko Pop and anime emporium. Forget the years that Hot Topic was leading the charge of fourth wave emo, when it was a trendy counter-culture king. I need you to remember when Hot Topic was a store for goths, its shelves stocked with bondage gear rather than Invader Zim or Rick and Morty t-shirts. I need you to remember when Hot Topics were banished to the food court, their logo looking like dripping blood, their door a giant circular hellmouth that looked as if it would swallow you whole.
I wasn’t just scared of being caught buying a CD I wasn’t supposed to be buying, I was scared of being seen walking into a Hot Topic at all.
Once inside I found the CD as fast as I possibly could. I went to the counter, paid, and walked out faster than Quibi launched and failed. I didn’t necessarily run out of the store, but I was certainly power walking, refusing to even look back. I think I even blocked out sound for a moment, because I didn’t realize my friends had been yelling for me until one of them physically grabbed my arm to get my attention.
Apparently, I had essentially just thrown my cash on the counter, grabbed my CD, and booked it, and the Hot Topic clerk was chasing after me through the food court, shouting for me as well.
Yeah, that wasn't scary!
I think my friend had to grab me again to get me to actually stop and talk to the guy. Turns out that I’d left my change on my counter and he just wanted to give it to me, bless his heart. He’d seemed so scary and intimidating inside Hot Topic, but outside he looked more like Dean Pelton from Community — hardly a threat.
Given my parents, I had legitimate reason to be nervous. But the clerk’s kindness was just the needle my fear needed to pop and deflate it down to a reasonable, manageable size. It helped me focus more on who I actually needed to fear — the people who made it so difficult to be myself — and less on people who were just trying to help me. Huh, maybe the things my parents raised me to fear weren’t actually so scary after all?
Anyway, I listened to that CD a lot the next few years. The second CD I bought from a store was the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack, an entirely uneventful story but a really banging album3. Eventually my mom (searching through my things, as she often did) found my CDs, we had a knock out, drag out fight about them, and she made me throw away the CD case for the Punisher soundtrack because it had a skull on it. I was allowed to keep the CD itself, though. A couple months later we took a family vacation to Florida, I listened to my CD player in front of my parents for the first time with no incident, and at one point my mom even snapped a picture of me sleeping with my headphones on.
I still have this photo on display as a reminder of small victories.
CHECK OUT
This essay was inspired by Where It All Went Wrong, a book?…booklet?…zine?…by music writer Dan Ozzi (whose newsletter, Reply Alt, has been featured in this newsletter before). Where It All Went Wrong finds Ozzi telling nine stories about nine moments in his life, framed by nine favorite albums. It’s stuck with me for a while now, is well worth reading, and is still on sale! Pick it up if you’re into that sort of thing, or maybe even if you aren’t! Things you don’t think you’ll like but end up liking are the best sort of things!
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
There’s about 40 copies of that Semisonic CD at my local secondhand music store, telling me that a lot of people took a similar journey as I did, from going “I need to own this song!” to realizing “Oh this is the only good song on this record, isn’t it?”
My friends didn’t do this for free, out of the kindness of their heart, though they only charged a couple bucks. I got the money to pay for these by pocketing my lunch money and skipping lunch, which I’d been doing anyway so that I could spend my lunch periods instead surfing Dragonball Z forums on the internet. I feel like this says a lot about me as a person.
Aside from the Lostprophets track, and, um, if you don’t know what went down with those guys, Google it yourself, but be assured that you really don't want to Google it yourself.