Daft Punk - TEACHERS

One October, many years ago after working by day as an accounting clerk for a local university for several months and finding the transition to a once-a-month pay schedule a bit of a purse stretcher, I decided to seek out a part time job. I knew I didn’t want to do anything that required a nametag or a training video. I casually applied to several locally owned independent books, video and music stores, one of which was a now non-defunct indie store called “the record exchange” at mission valley shopping center. I wasn’t expecting much of a response. Applying for “cool” jobs so close to a major university is a total crap shoot. It shocked me when I got a call for an interview a few weeks later. It was, in fact, my favorite interview of all time. All my soon-to-be-boss and I did was sit and talk about music for over an hour; favorites and shows we’ve seen. I got the job.

For the next 4 years or so I worked 20 hours or more a week, but I use the term “work” loosely. It was your standard retail store for all intents and purposes. We had daily checklists (pull old flyers from the windows, empty trash cans, etc…) but the majority of our time there was spent talking shit with customers and ourselves, going to shows with free tickets, hoarding vinyl, and scoping out promos. Some of the friendships born from the people to whom I sold music we mutually liked are still going very strong to this day, 10 years later.

When I left the store, it wasn’t pretty and isn’t relevant to the story. It wasn’t long after I left that the store sold out to a chain in Virginia and closed up and turned into a comic store, which failed after a year. The store sits empty to this day.

Over the years that I worked at the Record Exchange, a number of coworkers came and went, and there were about 3 of us that remained the entire time I was there myself, my boss and another part timer included. One of these gentle music obsessed souls that floated in and out of my life was a kid named Jade. He was Pilipino and a local house DJ. I can’t remember why he worked there for so short a time, I think he was one of those that just randomly didn’t show up one day. I don’t hold this against him, he was a cool kid. He was the one that told me about the edit of Phantom Menace that had JarJar Binks completely eliminated. This kid still has to be around town here somewhere, but it’s been so long, I wouldn’t probably know him if I saw him.

There was an order to the way things worked at TREX. We had a wall behind us that had a “now playing” rack. The rules were that we were supposed to pick 5 very different cds and put them on shuffle. If Jeff, the boss, was in store, then this is what you did. If he wasn’t, then the rules changed. They became, "whoever came on shift first had dibs." So say I come in at 4 and you came in at 5, I had enough time to scour the used cds and find every U2 and Erasure cd or something and you were screwed until close. I got stuck with a lot of crappy music that I eventually came to really like in this way. I would have never given Dave Matthews or Mindless Self Indulgence a chance before they were forced on me. Now I know to give any band 2 minutes to impress me.

However, when working with Jade (we called him Jader, as in Darth,) as he was a DJ, he was one of the few, if not only coworkers with whom I had a total rapport with musically. We spent a lot of time playing house music and bopping around the store, flashing the lights off and on, faking raves.

Daft Punk’s homework came out in January of 1997. We got an advanced copy a few months eariler that Jader and I literally fought over. We compromised by not shuffling the disc-changer at all and playing this album back to front, over and over for our next few shifts together. Jader was the only other kid I knew who knew the DJs/Artists listed in this song.

For example:
Jammin Gerald
Little Louie Vega
Green Velvet
Joey Beltram
Derrick Carter
Armand Van Helden


When I listen to “Teachers”, I think of the first person I knew who knew what I knew: Daft Punk is king and Homework is perhaps one of the best albums EVER.

I also think about this weird/awesome dance Jade did to this song across the store once, no idea how to describe it, so I’ll just say what I said and leave it at that.