A Life Affirming Hunt

Growing up in Northern Virginia, I had a pretty full suburban existence. We weren’t very close to any stores, but you could make it to the necessities and more without too much of a drive. If you wanted something obscure, though, you had to venture into the big city. The nation’s capital held all sorts of treasures that didn’t make their way into suburban malls. This was particularly true of some of the musical artifacts I craved as a teenager.

I recently referenced an article in Pitchfork about one such artifact.

Pitchfork has a fascinating retrospective of the single Operation Ivy album, Energy. Despite its deservedly legendary status, I outgrew my infatuation with the dubbed cassette I had fairly quickly. I’ll always give Op Ivy props though for making a 15-year-old love a song like “Bad Town” with saxophones in it.

Energy was the type of album you couldn’t pick up at a Sam Goody. For those kinds of records, you had to go to D.C. In particular, I would travel to a store called Smash Records, which resided in a dingy downtown basement in Georgetown. You had to descend a flight of stairs surrounded by painted black walls into the cramped confines of the shop.

Naz Hamid recently wrote about the hunt for music, books and skate goods. As a teenager, he and his cousin and friend would take the overnight train from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore to harvest the fruits of the big city. He includes a quote from Dan Sinker:

Thinking about how as a disaffected youth, going to the record store to buy pissed-off records meant taking two trains and walking forever and how many human-level interactions were involved and how, ultimately, that probably changed me for the better more than the records.

Similarly, I would take the train from a stop in Burke, Virginia, where my high school was, into the District. I distinctly remember getting off at the stop closest to the record store. The first sight was a vendor with a pop-up booth selling bootleg Black Bart Simpson shirts. A sure sign I wasn’t in NoVA anymore. The foreign sights were part of the hunt.

Though the trip was not quite as far as the ones Hamid took, it was a day trek. Far more challenging for a teenage navigation system than looking up a track on a portable computer. Perhaps, far more rewarding, as well.

I have long thought the lack of friction in our lives may be cause for a certain modern-day malaise. When nothing is challenging to obtain, the thrill of the hunt is gone.

From Hamid:

The hunt is built upon friction. Friction is good. Friction is healthy. Friction develops adaptation. The hunt is also born of curiosity. The desire to seek and discover something you don’t know, and might never know. In the pursuit of knowledge and experience, you teach yourself about empathy, other perspectives, and mold a person who is resilient and grateful.

It’s hard to argue against something that promotes more resilience and gratitude, which seem to be in ever dwindling supply.