Empire Records
Warner Bros Pictures (1995)
This coming-of-age comedy was a flop when it first appeared in theaters thirty years ago this week, but it's one of my favorite film of the 90's and it has gone on to become a cult classic. It may not have the brilliant performances or sharp social commentary of The Breakfast Club, but like the John Hughes classic, it's a snapshot of teenage life in its time. Both films also have an excellent soundtrack, and they're overflowing with charm. I saw it for the first time when I was 15 years old when it was on the new release wall at the rental stores and instantly fell in love with it.
Empire Records is even more interesting to me when I look back on it from 2025 than it was thirty years ago. There's no way that I could have realized it when I first saw this film, but its setting is a bubble in time. It takes place at a record shop that would have been my dream job when I was fifteen. Stores like this weren't uncommon in 1995. When I was a teenager, we had two chain stores in the Laurel Mall in Hazleton (Camelot and The Wall) and at least one independent shop called Joe Nardone's Gallery Of Sound. There were even more of them to the south in Allentown, to the north in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, and in the smaller towns in between.
The internet was in its infancy in 1995. We had dial-up service at 28.8k that would take several minutes to load a small jpeg image. The only streaming that existed back then was from RealAudio which buffered constantly and had terrible sound quality. It was nothing like streaming today where you could play any song at any time... just the occasional internet radio station that played whatever they felt like playing. You couldn't even buy tapes or CDs on the internet and have them shipped to your house. Amazon had just launched in July 1995 and they only sold books. eBay was still two years away. Wal-Mart didn't even have a website until the following year, and you couldn't buy anything from it until the year 2000. The bottom line is that unless you got your albums from a music club like Colombia House or BMG, you had to get them from a retail store. Most department stores had a modest selection of tapes and CDs in their electronics department, but they mostly stocked new releases and albums with Top 20 hits. If you wanted anything else, you had to go to a record shop.
All of this would change within five years of Empire Records. Broadband internet started to become more prevalent, the e-commerce world began to take shape, and file sharing platforms like Napster allowed people to download songs for free and make custom mixes of your favorite music on burned CD-Rs. Music stores didn't disappear entirely, but this movie was made at almost precisely the last moment before the first domino fell in the series of events that transformed stores like the one in Empire Records from being the center of the music buying world to an afterthought. Watching it now feels like taking a trip to The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, where time travelers in the classic Douglas Adams novel would visit to witness the the last moments of the universe before its destruction.
