The Democrats Are Winning the Record Store Battle
Argue all you want about last night’s contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But there’s no debating the fact that the Democrats are fiercely ahead in an equally important battle: the crate-digging wars.
Early Tuesday afternoon, hours before the presidential debate at the National Constitution Center, a woman walked into Latchkey Records, an indie record store in south Philadelphia, and asked owner Marc Faletti about his stock of Depeche Mode and other new wave records. After taking a few photos of what was in stock, like rare DJ mixes of the British synthpop band, she said she’d be back.
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Faletti recalls that, a half hour later, “a guy with an earpiece” entered the 1,000-square-foot store and started asking about its entrances and exits, and if the bathroom locked. The woman — who turned out to be part of the Harris team, along with the Secret Service agent — then returned with a startling piece of news: Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, and California governor Gavin Newsom would be coming by in 20 minutes to shop for vinyl.
After browsing the racks, with just one other customer in the store, Emhoff emerged and revealed his newly purchased vinyl: the first Stone Roses album and New Order’s Brotherhood. Newsom, meanwhile, brandished copies of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Jackson Browne’s Hold Out (in honor of his home state of California). As Faletti says, still stunned the next day, “I wasn’t expecting any of this to happen.”
The visit would seem out of place — were this political season not already defined by a High Fidelity-level of vinyl adoration, at least by the Democrats. Harris has stopped by record stores in Washington, D.C., and Michigan, where she bought albums by Davis and Roy Ayers, and a George Clinton toy. (The D.C. trip also inspired an album meme generator that allowed vinyl-heads to alter the album cover that Harris was holding in her hands in a viral photo.) Last December, Minnesota governor and VP candidate Tim Walz tweeted out a photo of a trip to Electric Fetus Records in Minneapolis, which netted him LPs by Genesis, Warren Zevon, Steve Winwood, and the Moody Blues. “Shop local for your vinyl,” he wrote in his post.
Once Faletti fully grasped what was happening, he gladly showed Emhoff and Newsom around his two-year-old shop. Emhoff dug into the new wave section and used his own credit card to buy his New Order and Stone Roses finds. “Full Manchester mode,” Faletti says. “We were talking about the Stone Roses and the perfection of that first album. With Brotherhood, my guess is that he really knows New Order. That cover is so bland that you really have to know what it is. He yanked it right out.”
When Emhoff asked what vinyl was moving in Latchkey, Faletti pointed to Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, the store’s top seller. “He’d heard of her, and I think he wanted to know what all the fuss was about, so he snagged it,” Faletti says. “His staff were super approving of the choice, obviously.”
Both Emhoff and Newsom were somewhat mystified by a bin stuffed with vintage LPs by Browne, Eric Clapton, Hall and Oates, and Billy Joel labeled “Yacht/Soft/Dad Rock.” “Why are all my favorite records in here?” Newsom asked. But Faletti says, “[Emhoff] seemed to grasp what we were going for. Maybe his kids have tossed those phrases around a bit? Though I will say Gavin had a point — even though later Clapton is a bit more mellow, he probably doesn’t belong in the soft rock section.”
This summer, Slate reported on the existence of J.D. Vance’s years-old public Spotify playlists — seven of them, devoted to topics like “Making Dinner” (Justin Bieber, Backstreet Boys, Lou Reed, Florence + the Machine), “Running #1” (Strokes, Wallflowers, Ween), and “Soul +” (Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Amy Winehouse). Trump’s tastes, as seen by the raft of artists who’ve demanded he stop playing their music at his rallies, have drawn more attention, but arguably for the wrong reasons.
For Faletti, and maybe other record geeks, the Emhoff and Newsom trip was meaningful. “When politicians actually know and love vinyl, it suggests they have a deeper connection that matters to them,” he says. “You only listen to vinyl if you care about details.”
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