Discussion: What’re You Listening To?

In All Things Must Pass, the bittersweet post-mortem of Tower Records, they eventually come to the part of the story when the wheels really started to fall off. The part where the banks come in and decide they know what’s best — that they know more than those who spent their lives building the chain. Like every other takeover of a sinking ship, a few of the wrong things got tossed overboard. Things that are deemed superfluous, but mean a lot to a lot of people. In aviation, that usually means outsourcing the ground handling or ticket counters. In the case of Tower Records, it was the scrapping of their in-house Pulse magazine. A magazine my music nerd friends and I used to ride our bikes across town to get copies of. A magazine whose every word we’d pore over. Why am I writing an elegy for a long-gone magazine? Because one of the best parts of Pulse was its Desert Island Discs feature. In each issue, they’d ask people to imagine being marooned, and what they’d want the soundtrack to…