Tokyo Vinyl

I’ve hit a wall with music made after 1989. The nineties were brutal, the 2000s worse, and everything that came after is just noise piled on older noise. When I see young people on TV clapping along to Image Dragons or Ed Sheeran, I fantasize about walking into that studio and hitting someone. But the real problem isn’t the obviously bad stuff. It’s that I can’t even listen to the good stuff anymore. Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar—they’re legitimately talented. Poppier than I’d normally want, darker than mainstream radio should allow, actually genuine. I should be into it. But I can’t stomach it. I’ve heard enough music in my life to see the pattern underneath. Everything is just remixing everything else, the same moves in different keys, different faces on old templates, forever. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The worst part is I can’t even escape backward. My youth music is unbearable now. Nirvana, Shakira, Spice Girls—I want to unsee my teenage self dancing to all of it. So I’ve retreated into obscurity. Haruomi Hosono. Alessandro Alessandroni. Sonny Rollins. Artists so far from the cultural center they’re basically ghosts. That’s where the real music lives—untouched by hype, unbothered by trends, still alive because nobody’s listening.

And that’s where Tokyo’s record shops come in. Waltz, LocoSoul, Dessinee—places where you’re surrounded by decades of music that never got playlisted, never got viral, never got compromised. Walking into these shops isn’t about discovering something cool or being ahead of the curve. It’s about finding music that exists outside the machine entirely. You dig through rows of vinyl from artists nobody remembers, from decades that got erased, and you remember something important: sound doesn’t need validation to matter. It doesn’t need the right moment, the right audience, the right hype cycle. It just needs to exist in a form you can hold and play.