I’LL just figure everything is cool, until I hear it from you.

Hear it from you

Empire Records is a nostalgic peek into the music store scene of the 90’s. It was a halcyon time when music stores were open until midnight, the floor functioned as a impromptu party area, cleanliness was so optional that you could glue quarters to the floor and call it art, young women were showing off their bare midriffs, young men had impossibly styled anime-esque hair, customers were making out in dedicated listening booths, and customer service consisted of eye-rolls and sarcastic quips and we liked it that way! Also apparently every hour was breaktime because you would have enough time to decorate and stage a fake funeral for a friend who just shaved off all her hair.

Also you can make roughly $6000 by yelling into an evening newscast and get people to come to your crappy midnight concert, subject to whether your not you can come up with a catchy and vaguely anti-authoritarian slogan.

The movie also featured an inescapable song from the Gin Blossoms that seemed to get more airplay on radio, MTV, and VH-1 than the movie did on its original release in theaters. (It one one of those great mid-90’s videos where the director was pretty much forced to incorporate a ton of film clips. It’s a little shocking how little we caught on that we were being marketed to through the medium of Top 40 Hits.)

It was also weird because “Til I Hear It From You” doesn’t really match the soundtrack that actually appears in the movie. I mean, Empire Records is the movie that includes a sequence where one of the characters imagines that he’s in GWAR and the climax has Renee Zellweger scream-singing with a metal band on a rooftop like she’s Joan Jett or something.

“Til I Hear It From You” would likely be spoken with the same Gen-X sneer as “Rex Manning Day.”