Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1139
Send important things into quarantine
(not to eat)
“Are you comfortable going downstairs?”
“convenient.”
“So, I’ll call you in 15 minutes, and you can come down and get it.”
Hanging up the phone, Zhang Wei put the handbag on the seat carefully, and started his SUV. The destination was a community within 3 kilometers, and it was still in Xinzhuang Town, so his travel could not be strictly restricted.
The consignee is a young lady, and her range of activities is much smaller: she can only go out of the unit door, but not out of the community.
The place to meet is at the back door of the community. There are fewer passers-by and fewer managers.
The back door is iron, like a fence, and one by one is empty in the middle. Zhang Wei first stuffed the bag into the lady along the middle seam. Then two records, two records, two records, two records, two records.
A total of ten vinyl records have been handed over. 6 Miyuki Nakajima, 2 Avril Lavigne, 1 Leslie Cheung, 1 Troye Sivan.
If he is usually in the store, he should have a few words with the lady, but “in that environment”, he doesn’t know what to say. After the handover, I drove back to the store immediately.
That day was March 28, and Zhang Wei, the owner of Shanghai Raccoon Record Store, had been living with 3,000 records for 10 days.
During the lockdown period, people still had a strong need for music, so they did not hesitate to spend “heavy money” for this, called flash delivery. If the distance is less than 3 kilometers, Zhang Wei will drive it to the customers by himself. It is not cost-effective to call the flash delivery, and most of the platforms have insufficient capacity, and customers often have to wait for a long time. During the lockdown period, Zhang Wei traveled to more than a dozen neighborhoods and gave out nearly 40 vinyl records.
The community he went to on March 24 shocked him: a temporary “rookie station” was surrounded by three rows of large shelves, completely blocking the gate of dozens of meters, and the residents waiting for the number to pick up the goods surrounded three. Row.
He finally saw the person who was waiting-the other party was used to overtime take-out and express delivery, and he never thought that the goods would be delivered 23 minutes after placing the order. He could see that the other party couldn’t hide his joy.
“I’m here!” Zhang Wei greeted him through various express cartons and handed the shopping bag containing the records to the other party. There was Taylor Swift’s Lover, the vinyl record that the guest was going to give away.
Picture: Zhang Wei is waiting for delivery at the gate of the community
The Raccoon Record Store was established in 2018 and initially only sold online. In April 2019, it opened a brick-and-mortar store in Shanghai’s Bund Financial Center. In 2021, the new store will move to Yueyang Road, Xuhui District, and become neighbors with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
After doing this for a long time, Zhang Wei naturally understands why people are extremely hungry for music sometimes. ——The errand rider doesn’t understand, and asks in surprise, “Isn’t there food here?”
After getting an affirmative answer, the rider stacks records on top of other equally “non-essential but urgently needed” supplies, such as snacks and drinks.
A customer who lives in Songjiang District bought more than a dozen copies in one go, “in a hurry”. Zhang Wei speculates that this is a new enthusiast who doesn’t have much stock in his hand, so he is more eager to get the record quickly.
The day before the lockdown
Bring your luggage into the office
Shanghai, which has gradually entered a static state at the end of March, has experienced a cold spring. Zhang Wei, who was sleeping in the office, curled up on a small sofa, his calves wandering outside the armrests, facing the chill brought by the rain.
A few days ago, the community where he lived was about to implement a longer-term lockdown. At the beginning, on March 8, the community was still under precise prevention and control – only one unit with close contact was closed. When taking a walk after dinner, he also looked at the living environment of the staff from a distance, and listened to the neighbors discussing that the banned person should be doing well, and that someone would bring food to eat.
For the first time in more than two years, the community was closed and controlled. People were simply curious and “not nervous at all”. On the 15th, the community notified the whole of the closure for two days. He still felt that it was not a big deal, and he did not want to go to the supermarket and vegetable market to crowd with people. On the evening of the 17th, the unblocking notice did not come. After another half day, I suddenly received a notice: the closure will be temporarily lifted before 5:00 a.m. on the 19th, and the closure will continue after that.
During the brief unblocking, he decided to move to the office, which is also a record warehouse. His idea was simple: live until at least March 31, and keep shipping.
The food that can be taken at home is very limited, because there is no storage for long-term closed home.
At 15:00 on the 18th, when the community was allowed to go out, he rushed out with his neighbors who were in a hurry to buy vegetables, and carried the luggage into the SUV in several batches. At 19:00, the community started a new round of lockdown ahead of schedule.
He brought out 12 packets of Laotan sauerkraut instant noodles, 4 bags of pickled vegetables, 2 buckets of Nongfu Spring, 1 can of tea, 1 bottle of melatonin, 3 bottles of health care, and hypoglycemic drugs – only one week’s supply, because too much I was busy, and it took two days for the medicine to stop before I found out, and I bought it for another 14 days. That was the longest lockdown time he could think of at the time.
Photo: Zhang Wei’s camper is full of records to give away
In mid-to-late March, the store still insisted on opening, and the turnover was cut in half, and then cut in half. The number of transaction orders gradually reached one place, and the clerks were also sealed off at home one after another. The SF Express delivery system shows that there are more and more regions where delivery is stopped: first, Jilin and Changchun, then Hangzhou and Ningbo, and then Qingdao and Weihai are also “hanging”.
The couriers stranded in the office were gradually coded from several to three rows. The logistics cycle has also become long: an order sent to Jilin City on March 6, arrived at the transfer point in Jilin on the 8th and was not moved again, and was not signed until May 11, which took 66 days. An order sent to the United States during this period will arrive in 10 days.
On March 25, after delivering the goods as usual, he took the vegetables to the gate of his community, ready to hand over to his wife. But the security told him that the community had been diagnosed, and the items could only be in and out. He didn’t eat the bento prepared for him at home. His name in the vinyl circle is “Big Hungry Fish”, which means “Stay Hungry Stay Foolish”. Now he understood the first half of the famous saying better.
Materials are increasingly scarce. At one point, Zhang Wei only had instant noodles left. When he was really hungry, he went to the Qingmei supermarket in the park where his office was located to buy two cucumbers. The SF courier who came to receive the parcel every day couldn’t see it, and he even came to deliver a meal at noon, “it’s amazing”, Zhang Wei didn’t even know where the other party got the meat and vegetable lunch. The courier didn’t accept the money, and repeatedly warned: “Brother, don’t eat instant noodles all the time!”.
Picture: The courier’s little brother gave Zhang Wei a free lunch
After more than ten days of contact, Zhang Wei and the courier established a friendship like a friend. In the long-term chat, Zhang Wei learned that the courier brother is from Pingdingshan, Henan. There are more than a dozen brothers at their site. When the closure and control are not so strict in the city, they can ensure that the logistics is still through – although it is slower than usual. Not a lot.
At first, Zhang Wei thought that the “business” of this little brother was good, and he could send out 300 albums alone. But later, with the tightening of control and control, the flash deliverymen and couriers who run on empty roads every day also need to strictly abide by the epidemic prevention policy.
The leaders of SF Express asked them not to go home because they were afraid that they would not be able to come out to work after the closure of the community. The little brother, the courier, had to take all the dozen people from the outlet to the hotel. He stayed there for a month, and put in more than 10,000 yuan. Talk to Zhang Wei in the chat.
Later, Zhang Wei went to Qingmei supermarket to buy something and chatted with the salesperson. The salesperson said, “Now the young guys at SF Express can’t buy anything to eat. They are too hungry, and they don’t want to eat instant noodles. They don’t have the strength to go out and eat instant noodles all the time.”
The persistence of a music fanatic
In the office, Zhang Wei would stand in front of the computer every day as soon as he opened his eyes, check the 20 or 30 addresses that had stopped sending, and if he caught one, he would send it quickly. Usually, a customer expresses that he has no money, and he hopes that he will help to save a disc, and he will definitely leave it to that person to buy it. During the period of lockdown, he still tried to fulfill his contract as soon as possible.
He is familiar with the number “33”, which is the rotational speed of vinyl records, which is roughly equal to the company’s operating cycle from purchase to receipt. To make this cycle stable, the most important part is the circulation of goods.
Records are placed neatly in 60 storage compartments. In addition to delivery, he also has several duties: he took out more than 3,000 newly arrived records from 70 cartons, and then entered the product information one by one into the background; he packed more than 100 couriers a day at most, and after three and a half years of In practice, his hand speed is stable at 2 minutes and 30 seconds, but he needs to stop frequently to reply to customer messages.
Zhang Wei hates anything that might damage the vinyl. He has researched dozens of box materials, from the custom packaging of major record companies to pizza boxes and DIY packaging, and finally improved and customized a carton box with four corner protectors on the outside, which costs more than short-distance shipping. Even so, he repeatedly told errand riders to pay more attention.
After getting busy, the epidemic and lockdown no longer bothered him significantly, and became more like a background noise.
When packing records, my ears are not idle. I listen to more than a dozen vinyl records a day, play one side in 25 minutes, get up to rest, turn over and continue to work – but most of the time is for audition, which belongs to work. . He rarely has the opportunity to extract his treasures from the upper right corner of the storage cabinet.
He even found work inspiration from the epidemic, with a bit of dark humor: he ordered an atmospheric electronic album dedicated to plants, hoping that the onions and garlic grown in Shanghai people’s homes would grow faster.
Pictured: Plants listen to ambient electronic music that is beneficial to growth
Running a raccoon record store was a lot harder than he expected.
Since his identity changed from director of PPTV music channel to director of Raccoon Records, “there is always a particularly huge hurdle to cross.” It was not until the end of 2021 that Raccoon Records, as one of the three official members of the “World Record Store Day” mainland region, held three major events, and the physical store was changed to a larger and better space, and he felt that the road to entrepreneurship was stable.
In the Spring Festival of 2022, he said to his wife: We have survived the first three years of the hardest start-up company, and it should not be easy to die.
On March 5, Zhang Wei also specially distributed red envelopes to shop assistants in the DingTalk group – his happiness exceeded the limit of 200 yuan per person for WeChat red envelopes. He also sent a message of encouragement. Looking back on March 2019, only the online store’s Raccoon Records had a promotion for the first time, setting a record of 10,000 yuan in single-day sales. At that time, he felt that it was too good.
The little raccoon record store once went through the twists and turns brought by the outbreak of the 2020 epidemic.
In February of that year, the store’s turnover was 2,000 yuan, which was just equal to his parking fee that month. At that time, there were only a few customers in the store a day, most of them were regular customers, and the masks were strictly worn, so there was no time to chat like in the past. When checking out, nine times out of ten, you will ask: How long can it last?
Before the latest lockdown, his store was closed year-round, only closed for four days in early 2020. He wakes up at six or seven in the morning to work, spinning for 15 hours, and has no chance to concentrate on listening to his favorite music.
With his persistence, the record store grew up hard but vigorously, and established status and fame in the circle. Song Wenshan, the gold-medal manager of the “Little Tigers”, Liu Yuan, the leader of Cui Jian, director Zhang Yibai, dancer Jin Xing, and musicians Celebrities such as Man Jiang are customers of the record store. By 2022, there will be no need for any promotional discounts and record store turnover will be at an all-time high.
On the day the new store opens in 2021, he played his first song, Dream On. This is the first song in the Aerosmith Collection, and in the summer of 1997, he used the only CD player at home, a 486 computer optical drive, to listen to the Collection over a thousand times until it broke.
At that time, he just started to buy discs frantically, just in time for the prosperity of domestic audio-visual stores. In his memory, there were as many audio-visual stores as there are now Michelle Ice City, especially Handan Road, Wujiaochang, where he frequented, which almost connected into a street. He always eats the cheapest meals and buys CDs and cassettes with all the money he saves. Once he was robbed by more than 20 gangsters, but because he just bought a CD, he didn’t even have the money to take the bus, so he escaped. He also bought a lot of pirated recording tapes. The lowest-end type was a piece of paper with a disc and a plastic bag. He didn’t even write the title of the song, so he just listened blindly.
Most of his music introductions came from the introduction of the owner of the video store at that time, so after he became the owner, he also liked to chat with young people who were just playing vinyl. There was once a child who had just finished the high school entrance examination and chatted with him for a long time about the recording technology of The Beatles in the 1960s.
Those young music fans these days usually know a lot.
Times are tough, but luckily there’s music
In 2007, Roger Waters, the soul of the legendary band Pink Floyd, held a concert, and the audience was immersed in a dreamlike audio-visual experience and witnessed the slow rise of the famous symbol in rock history: the giant pink pig balloon from the Pink Floyd album cover , which reads “You can rewrite history, but not change it.”
Like many music events, this concert has only Shanghai stop on the mainland. “What reason do we have for not loving this city?” Zhang Wei still thinks that concert was the pinnacle of his musical experience, and he has no regrets in his life.
On March 29, Zhang Wei’s vinyl supply guarantee came to an abrupt end. He went to adjust the goods, and by the way, he bought a cake at the only open bakery next to the record store, ready to reward his daughter who had been taking online classes for more than half a month. As soon as he stepped into the house, the team leader of the building sent a notification from the group of residents that the community was closed and controlled urgently. This time, he didn’t have time to set off again.
From April 1st, Shanghai has entered the state of global static management. Not only the Raccoon Record Store, but also the well-known record stores in Shanghai, such as Uptown Records, which is also an official member of the “World Record Store Day”, and Daily Vinyl, which has been established for 8 years, have all stopped shipping.
The Raccoon Record Store began to support operations with pre-sale, and Zhang Wei laughed at himself as the owner of “vinyl futures”. Some of the albums that were pre-sold in April were not officially released until the end of August, but people are still willing to book this expectation, just like a customer message said: no hurry. This is a little surprise left after the epidemic is over.
Zhang Wei himself also has a strong need for music. From the first time he confirmed his love for music, the power of notes has been vibrating in his life.
In 1994, a classmate who had a good relationship with him at school invited him to be a guest at home. The classmate pretended to be mysterious and closed the curtains of the house, lifted the cloth on the sound box, and took out a small box.
On the square CD, there is a red breathing light, which flickers and flickers. It was one of the greatest rock bands in human history, Pink Floyd’s record The Dark Side of the Moon, Deluxe Edition.
For the first time, Zhang Wei heard the music called “rock” in his ears. At that time, he couldn’t understand it at all, but he felt an unprecedented shock – like the melody stored in the fine grooves of vinyl, which was indelible in his memory.
Music can carry people’s memories and past lives. This is why, the customers in the store buy the most, often “classic” works.
For a long time, when Zhang Wei listened to Leslie Cheung, he remembered the first tape he owned, which his junior high school classmates put on the album. As soon as I listen to Nirvana, I can recall the image of high school hugging and crying with people in the classroom. Six months after the suicide of spiritual idol Kurt Cobain, they learned this belated and sad news from the magazine.
In the later days, Zhang Wei did not become a vinyl collector, but began to do retail: he paid special attention to the sharing and dissemination of music. The slogan (slogan) of Raccoon Records, “Listen well,” implicitly means: I help you so that you can hear well.
During the lockdown period, this slogan (slogan) had a deeper meaning.
People who are quarantined are healed by music again and again. In 2021, a University of Helsinki study showed that music significantly lowered levels of the stress hormone cortisol in test subjects, even after listening to it for only 10 minutes. In a survey of music lovers by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 75% said that music has provided them with a “feeling of life as usual” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to QQ Music, from March 15th to April 27th, during the daytime (7-17 o’clock), the per capita listening time of Shanghai users per hour was higher than that of other parts of the country. According to NetEase Cloud Music, the per capita listening time in Shanghai increased by 8% from March to April. The most sought-after song by Shanghai users on both platforms is “The Lonely Brave”.
On the evening of April 10, online concerts were held at the Tencent Conference. The host shared the screen and shared playlists, including recent searches unique to Shanghai: “The Sun Never Sets” and “Tomorrow Will Be Better.” In each small split screen, the neighbors who have just become acquainted sing together. Some people picked up their guitars and walked to the balcony, and some people found a cheering light stick that had been useless for a long time.
That night, the pianist Song Siheng took off the volunteer protective clothing and started live broadcasting at home for the first time, playing the “epidemic music diary” he created. The fourth piece of “Morning” made him particularly emotional. The long chords throughout the text are like a metaphor for the perception of time in the seal control: there is only one note in each measure, and it sounds very long, but the whole score looks very short and has few notes. . As he often felt recently, the current time was almost infinitely stagnant, but when he recalled it, he felt that time passed very fast.
This set of works was born to solve his irritability. Words can’t relieve his complicated mood, and music, like the word written by an alien in “Arrival”, has an all-encompassing precision.
“Music is highly organized, and it uses rational methods to make sensibility possible. People can understand the rational spirit contained in music through sensibility and gain peace,” he said. During the live broadcast, Song Siheng hardly spoke, just played one by one. When everything is played, the live broadcast stops.
Also on the evening of April 10, Zhang Wei had been home for 13 days. Before bed, he opens Apple Music and finds Pink Floyd’s Time. Before that, he cried silently in the quilt for half an hour, not wanting his family to see.
Facing the unknown made him feel powerless. He has lived the life of an ordinary Shanghai citizen, and dozens of records have already been moved to stores and offices, and he has a record player at home. After returning home, the music he listens to the most is the background sound of his daughter’s online class.
More than ten years ago, when he revisited “Shanghai Bund”, he accidentally discovered that Time was the soundtrack.
Shanghai, his beloved band, and the extremely long “time” in the seal and control. Familiar elements collided with fresh coincidences, which calmed his mood and began to brew a plan: when the record store reopens, give medical care and peace to the members. Volunteers give each one a record.
At that time, he will confidently tell these old friends: “I know what you like, and I know what you don’t have. You don’t have to say it, it depends on whether you are satisfied with what I gave you.”
This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1139
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