Release The Hounds — How Kate Bush’s timeless classic called out to me
They say you should never judge a book by it’s cover.
But in the days before music was available digitally on tap, at the touch of a button, that was often all we could do. I personally lost count of the hours and days I spent standing in record stores, whether chains like HMV or independents, simply sifting through albums with no way to listen to them. If you were lucky, a store might have a listening unit, but it wasn’t common, or it was pre-loaded with whatever was popular at the time. The suggestion that the store workers put something else in was met with blank stares.
We didn’t have cool record stores like the ones described in “High Fidelity” where I grew up.
Often, if something caught your eye, you’d just have to imagine what it sounded like. Because, frankly, we were lucky as kids to get the money to purchase an album a month. And that was usually allocated to either the artists we already knew that we loved — like Michael Jackson and Prince — or the social stigma of needing to have whatever was cool at the time. Without dating myself too specifically, let’s just say that a lot of the “nu-metal” era didn’t stand the test of time despite what seemed like every single kid I knew buying certain albums. Certain artists were lucky to catch a zeitgeist at the expense of…