The other day I was listening to a podcast where the hosts were reviewing a movie. The movie credits involved a vinyl single spinning, with the director spotlighting a storied record label's logo, and one of the hosts remarked something along the lines of "back then, you couldn't go wrong with that label."
That thought stayed with me, and then I realized that it's something I do think about fleetingly from time to time.
In the 1990s I was a teenager and a twentysomething who was probably overinvested in uncommercial rock'n'roll, which meant that a bunch of record labels meant a helluva lot to me. None of those labels meant as much to me - for a startling amount of time - as Matador Records did. I wanted to hear everything they released. I wanted to buy every non-Matador product they carried in their online store. I thought the employees of this label quite irreverant and clever and dangerous, and being a Matador Records patron felt to someone that age like being part of some special secret society. They seemed determined, sometimes to a fault, to embrace and champion myriad genres. They had an anti-corporate magazine. They had cruel satirical mailers that came when you ordered stuff from them. (I ordered a ton of stuff before becoming a critic, at which point I started getting promo.)
There was even a message board (which later spawned a "fake" message board) that became it's own little dysfunctional family. A lot of us eventually wound up here and never left.
Matador Records still exists and still puts out records (including some favorites) but for the last 10-20 years ... it's just been another record label, putting out music that makes various generations happy in various ways, but (to me) with less sass and pomp and ceremony, one with fewer releases per year. I'm glad it survived and thankful for the music it continued to give us - but there's something sad about thinking about it, which is probably the difference between adolescence and middle age, or something.
So let's do what we do best: let's look back, poll by poll.
Poll Results
| Option | Votes |
| Superchunk - No Pocky For Kitty | 13 |
| Unsane - Unsane | 7 |
| Teenage Fanclub - A Catholic Education | 6 |
| Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 - Lovelyville | 5 |
| Teenage Fanclub - God Knows It’s True | 2 |
| Mecca Normal - Water Cuts My Hands | 2 |
| Chain Gang - Kill For You | 1 |
| Shams - Quilt | 1 |
| Various Artists - New York Eye & Ear Control | 1 |
| Dustdevils - Struggling, Electric, & Chemical | 1 |
| Superchunk - Superchunk | 1 |
| Various Artists - Covenant House Party PROMO SAMPLER | 0 |
| Railroad Jerk - Younger Than You | 0 |
| Toiling Midgets - Golden Frog | 0 |
| Superchunk - Breadman | 0 |
| H.P. Zinker - ...And There Was Light... | 0 |
| Dustdevils - Geek Drip | 0 |
| H.P. Zinker - The Know It All | 0 |
| Railroad Jerk - Railroad Jerk | 0 |
| Teenage Fanclub - Everybody’s Fool | 0 |
― Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Saturday, 15 January 2022 01:26 (two years ago) link