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One last trip to Fat Beats:

Fat Beats NYC: 406 Avenue of the Americas, NY, NY.
The door to the store is tiny and fairly nondescript, with just a Xerox marking the entrance. If you don't know to look for it, you'll likely walk right by it.

When I first graduated from college, way back in the days of Y2K, I got a job working for a startup in NYC. Initially it was pretty exciting; I got to hang out in the city every day, and I was getting paid to do something I would've done anyway, namely work on computers. That excitement quickly faded, as I soon found myself working fifteen hour shifts seven days a week in an attempt to cash in on what was left of the dotcom boom. Within just a few months I was completely stressed out (word to Faith Evans). One of the few things that kept me going was my weekly trips to Fat Beats, which happened to be just a couple of train stops from my office, where I spent my lunchbreak digging through their records and listening to dudes at the counter get into heated arguments over the lyrical qualities of underground emcees I had never heard of. Eventually some things happened to the city that led me to leave it for good, forcing me to give up my Fat Beats visits.

As I've mentioned a few times, I began taking classes at Scratch a few months ago. Scratch is a block away from Fat Beats, so after a nine year hiatus I once again found myself making weekly trips to the store, this time around buying old school vinyl for my dj classes. As Dallas Penn mentioned, the area's changed a bit from the old days, but Fat Beats itself isn't all that different from how I remember it.

At this point, you've likely heard that Fat Beats is finally closing the doors to its remaining retail outlets. The NYC storefront is closing next weekend, September 4th. I'm told they'll be having in-store performances every day from now until its closing, however since the last class of my semester at Scratch was this past weekend I made my final trip to the store on Saturday. My experience was about as close as it gets to the authentic Fat Beats experience: out front two random dudes were handing out flyers for their record label and hawking their latest mixtape, while upstairs one of the customers in the store broke into a word-for-word recital of Smif N Wessun's Bucktown when the instrumental was played on the store's speakers. As a final memory, I could have done a lot worse than that.

While I was there, it occurred to me that despite the store's legendary status in hip hop, most of you have likely never been there. I took a few pictures (from a very old cellphone, so forgive me for the relatively low quality) to give you some idea of what the store was like. One of the guys at the counter was ice grillin' me as I fumbled with the camera on my phone, so I only managed to get one shot off in the store itself.


The stairs up to the store, which is on the 2nd floor.


A listing of the in-store events from the past week. Interesting to see a myspace era rapper on the list with some of these older artists.


This is the one shot I managed to take while in the store itself. At the time of this photo, the guy in the red polo is in the middle of reciting Bucktown. Classic album covers are tacked onto the walls and ceilings, old school records are on the back right, new vinyl on the left wall. Cds and assorted other vinyl fill the middle racks. Unfortunately I don't think this shot really gives a sense of how compact (or cramped, depending on your point of view) the store is.


My final purchase from Fat Beats: LL Cool J's Boomin' System and Going Back To Cali, Run DMC's King of Rock and Jaydee's Everybody Get Up.

And finally here's video of DJ Eclipse giving a tour and breaking down the history of the store:


Fat Beats tour with DJ Eclipse