The medium is the message, or so said a man who went to my rival high school some time long before my life. My high school did not exist when Marshall McLuhan was a youth, so there was no such rivalry then. My high school and its surrounding neighbourhood was built in the late 1950s and early 1960s as an act of colonial violence (another essay, another day), including a mall across the street. The rival high school didn’t have a mall across the street. Heh.
I went to that middle school/high school combo in the latter half of the nineties and into the aughts. It was a great time to develop cultural tastes in a period of overlapping music media. Records were out and not yet in again, but our parents had stashes that we could raid if we wanted to listen to the classics; tapes had more recently seen their day but weren’t quite extinct. By far the dominant medium of music was the compact disc. It was the perfect mix of a more, well, compact size, and of dimensions that made them easy to store in a bin and flip through when shopping for music. The big artists had their own tabs. Others were under the alphabetical “various” tabs. There was a certain non-melodic music that came from the sound of plastic cases tapping as you rhythmically browsed through the selection in that column of the bin. Some people, with confidence and conviction in their tastes in music, flipped through those CDs with purpose and style that produced such an artful beat. They knew what they were looking for, and it was not in the rack at the front of New Releases or what was hot to sell, but buried in the rest of the stock of the store, if the store was good.
The mall across the street from my high school had an independent music store called Noiseworks. It sold new and used CDs, posters, t-shirts, some music-related movies and documentaries, the works for that kind of store. It was decorated and designated for an inventory geared towards rock music and its subsets. It had a bit of everything but didn’t intentionally market towards the popular crowd, or those into country music or most hip-hop of the day. The employees played over the speakers their choice of grunge, alternative, punk, and even hardcore, or sometimes classic rock.
My friends and I would go there when any of us had the time or money to spare. Lunch hours, spare periods, on weekends and after school, we would walk over there and see what they have. Twenty dollars in birthday money could get us a new CD of our choosing, or two or three used ones if they had good ones there. They would have big posters, 3x4 feet or whatever the standard was, sold in rolls covered in cellophane that we’d have to lay out on our bedroom floor and put all of our school binders and textbooks on each corner overnight to flatten out. They sold t-shirts, mostly sized in unisex large, which was convenient for both my gender expression and my size.
I must’ve bought dozens of CDs there over the years of the bands I was into at the time. I far preferred that store over the chain music stores like HMV, which were in bigger malls farther away. It always felt cooler to shop in an independent store dedicated to music than browse through the music section of everything stores like Walmart or Zellers (both of which were in that same mall at different times in my high school period) and the music selection was superior for my tastes. The best ones I bought used.
Then the early 2000s brought Napster and other music downloading services that gave another format for people to listen to music in. My family got a CD burner for our computer, so instead of perusing Noiseworks I could obtain copies of what my friends had and I didn’t. Even at the time, as a teenager without a job, I preferred to purchase what was available at Noiseworks over burning CDs instead. The album art was part of the whole package after all, and I could feel good for supporting a store that I needed on more than a transactional level. But overall, people were buying less. The mp3 became dominant for its compressed size and ability to be copied and transferred through p2p software. Electronics companies, particularly Apple, caught on and made mp3 players and sold songs through stores, making even the capitalist ass-kissing loyal and lawful consumers buy less and less of their music in the form of CDs.
And thus, as a casualty of the larger evolution of the market of music, Noiseworks eventually closed. I don’t recall exactly when, but it was fairly early on in that period of change, and it was devastating. I was in university by then and could go to a mall nearby that had an HMV, but it still felt far less intimate and meaningful to buy music there than it ever did at Noiseworks. Noiseworks was dimly lit. It was smaller, cozier. The people at the counter were cooler and there were fewer customers there, or at least fewer customers who were not like me.
(Random side note: I write this on a day I was at the mall near the university that had an HMV, which closed back in the early 10s; the outline of the letters in the sign, however, and the holes for the screws that kept them in place, are still there; that particular mall might be another essay, another day of its own.)
Every time I’ve had to move, I’ve gone through purges on what physical media I owned (books, movies, music) but didn’t use anymore and could get rid of to save space. When I was last moving in 2015, after Spotify came into the picture as a source of nearly whatever music I wanted to hear, I decided I was going to burn all of my CD collection onto my hard drive for preservation and sell almost all of the CDs to save myself space. I did that (perhaps regrettably so, as I’ve started collecting music again and have re-bought some CDs I previously owned) but kept a few that meant things to me. I kept the first CD that was ever gifted to me, which is the soundtrack to The Muppet Movie. I kept bootlegs of live concerts a friend gave me. And I kept two CDs I bought at Noiseworks, from the used section: Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and Soundgarden’s Superunknown. I chose them because these were favourites of mine in high school during the Noiseworks phase. I can recreate the scenes in my memory of purchasing them, picking them up and nervously taking them to the counter worrying what the clerk was going to think of me. Their pre-loved status made the cases physically different—they both had some wear and scratches, and the booklet with Superunknown had gone wavy from being spilled on at some point by the original owner. They are emblematic of the time and place when they were bought, in format, in genre, and in the life story of those physical pieces of media.
The medium that these things are is the message. They are a time and a place in my life that I value, where a local independent store made a tremendous impact on my personal development by providing a space where I could soak in the energy of music that I loved and buy things that helped me express myself and feel connection to a cultural world. They are the legacy of Noiseworks.