A Quote by Jason Reynolds
I would go to the store, I would buy cassette tapes, and I would read the liner notes and sort of subconsciously creating the connections between the rappers that I was reading and the poets that they were teaching us in school.
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One of the first cassette tapes I ever purchased was the 'Rambo III' score. I was not allowed to see 'Rambo,' but my mom would allow me to buy the music, so I would listen to that score over and over and imagine the movie.
I grew up in the time just when cassettes were waning and CDs were growing. And so mix tapes - and not mix CDs - mix tapes were an important part of the friendship and mating rituals of New York adolescents. If you were a girl and I wanted you - to show you I like you, I would make you a 90-minute cassette wherein I would show off my tastes. I would play you a musical theater song next to a hip-hop song next to an oldie next to some pop song you maybe never heard, also subliminally telling you how much I like you with all these songs.
My elementary school teachers were big on pushing kids to read. If you read a certain amount of books, they would provide you with incentives, sort of like what we are doing with the WrestleMania Reading Challenge.
When I got in trouble, my mom would make me read or write - I would have to write my name over and over and over again. It gave me great penmanship, but I also just liked to write. Every time I would go to the store, I would buy a notebook. I had thousands of them.
People don't go to the record store anymore. It's crazy. The culture used to be so much stronger. People would go and support you, and go pick up the album. Not just for the music, but for the liner notes, for the artwork, just for the whole thing and to have it, and be able to say, 'I have this album.'
When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I would pretend to be on the radio. I bought a mixer and these big, ugly headphones and I would literally broadcast the cassette tapes in my bedroom.
Most of us live for the critic, and he lives on us. He doesn't sacrifice himself. He gets so much a line for writing a criticism. If the birds should read the newspapers, they would all take to changing their notes. The parrots would exchange with the nightingales, and what a farce it would be!
When I was about 7 years old, I had been labeled dyslexic. I'd try to concentrate on what I was reading, then I'd get to the end of the page and have very little memory of anything I'd read. I would go blank, feel anxious, nervous, bored, frustrated, dumb. I would get angry. My legs would actually hurt when I was studying. My head ached. All through school and well into my career, I felt like I had a secret. When I'd go to a new school, I wouldn't want the other kids to know about my learning disability, but then I'd be sent off to remedial reading.
One of the first cassette tapes I ever purchased was the Rambo III score. I was not allowed to see Rambo, but my mom would allow me to buy the music, so I would listen to that score over and over and imagine the movie. But those limitations and not being able to access those things made me so much more excited about them.
I've always been a ravenous consumer of opinion. When I was in my high school library and my college library, I would read 'National Review' and I would read 'The Nation' and I would read 'The American Spectator' and I would read 'Mother Jones.'
When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'
Every record store and record chain has folded; they don't exist. They do not exist. And the only two outlets that would still sell CDs were Best Buy and Wal-Mart. They now have stopped selling it. There's nowhere you can go into a store and buy a CD in America. That's how it is.
I remember when I was a kid and I would go to the comic-book store, I would have no idea what was going on in that month's issues. Sometimes I wouldn't even know what comics were coming out until I walked into the store.
I would model well-being by presenting myself as a high-energy person who loves what I am doing and who is thrilled to be able to offer books, tapes, and products designed to make people feel good. I would explain that they are in a store filled with this kind of energy and that creating such a space is exactly why I got into the business in the first place. If you want to feel good, then my store is the place you should visit on a regular basis. I would stay very informed about what's out there and make sure I carry many things with very high energy.
It was so exciting to go to the record shop and buy a piece of vinyl and hold it, read the liner notes, look at the pictures. Even the smell of the vinyl.
We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.
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