a movie to remember: Empire Records

I remember when I first watched Empire Records. It was sometime around the year 2000. I was still a teenager, and it had probably been about five years since its release. I also remember the feeling the film left me with: a sense of belonging.

Although it is technically a simple story in which a group of young people spend a day trying to save the small record store where they work, while each of them deals with their personal dramas, insecurities, and a few romances, what makes the film special is not the plot. It is the atmosphere.

For them, the place was not just a store. It was their meeting place and their refuge. It basically made them a family, surrounded by countless CDs and posters.

Nowadays, rewatching it makes me feel somewhat nostalgic, because I am forced to remember a time when, in order to discover music, you had to visit a record store, and that was, in fact, magical. I would also like to give an honorable mention here to the “Disco-briu” record store in my hometown, which possibly closed around the same time I first watched Empire Records. But the film captures a feeling shared by everyone who lived through part of the 1990s: the intimate relationship between music and identity, combined with youth.

Damn the man. Save the Empire.