Music Rochester

Every so often The Guardian runs a story about the disappearance - or at least precarious existence - of local record shops. There is another in the paper today. I often complain about Rochester as a cultural backwater, but there are at least three terrific independent record stores in town (compare that to supposedly hip places like, say, Ann Arbor, which seems unable to sustain any) - The Bop Shop, Record Archive, and Lakeshore Record Exchange. Each of the stores occupies a distinct niche - for instance, I try not to go the Lakeshore for fear that I will single-handedly dilute the hipness of the staff and clientele simply by virtue of my age. In any case, on this dimension at least our cultural ecology seems relatively robust.