THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

It was nearly half-way through 8th grade, and the kids -- some pre-pubescent, most not -- were on either side of the room while the music played, with little inkling of the mixed minglings of dances to come. But when "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" by Michael Jackson came on, I decided that I had enough of middle school indecision, and I started dancing. (Given my height and weight at the time, I can only assume I looked like those Kokopelli with a seizure.) Pretty quickly, the kids gathered around me and started clapping, either with me or at me, and I was lost in the transformative power of the music. A little bit of MJ's magic was sprinkled on me at that moment, and I luxuriated it for as long as I could. A few years later, when I started to DJ, I found that it was pretty easy to get people to dance if you had the records of Michael Jackson in your pocket, even when tastes started to shift to hip-hop. He was part of the fabric of our monoculture, a child star i...

I know that I shouldn't be surprised when another record store closes in the end times of physical media, but there I was on Thursday night, staring at the empty space on Woodward Avenue in Berkley where FYE -- a.k.a. Sam Goody, after the corporate restructuring and rebranding -- used to be, finding out that another one bites the dust. And it's not like anyone has a deep and rich emotional connection to FYE, a shrinking mall chain stuffed with "lifestyle" products of which music is a small sliver, aside from the people FYE employs (or used to employ, I suppose). But it was still a bummer. I was down in the Detroit area on Thursday night for my first concert of 2019 (and my first concert after Michigan had legalized marijuana, incidentally), and I slotted some extra time before the show to hit a record store or three. I started with my first ever visit to Melodies & Memories  in Eastpointe, and holy shit is that a great name for what the store offers. A few mile...