Everything but the Coffee by Bryant Simon Read Free Book Online Page A

this dynamic, Starbucks offers a watered-down version of this transaction, taking its less adventurous patrons away from the glass towers and enclosed malls of the developed world. The coffee company promises to escort customers on voyages to the most rural, underdeveloped, and authentic spots on earth, places with lots of vicarious cultural capital in bobo and creative class social networks. Starbucks and NPR, then, create package tours for those on breaks between their own overseas trips, and smooth sailing for the less adventurous, those who want discovery but want it close by, clean, and not too far outside the mainstream.
    Coffee anchors the Starbucks discovery experience. “Look at the world through the eyes of Starbucks coffee,” the company Web site suggests. “Geography is flavor,” according to another of the firm’s favorite taglines. With each cup (even if it is loaded with milk and sugar), Starbucks promises to take its customers on journeys to distant, exotic lands. For a time, Starbucks even issued coffee passports. With every bag of single-origin beans purchased, you got a stamp, certifying that you had been to Ethiopia, then to Colombia, and then to East Timor. Of course, you didn’t need a visa or vaccines or to take your shoes off at air-port security to go to these places, and that is a big part of the appeal.
    While the Starbucks discovery aesthetic begins with coffee, it gets sounded out with music. Any Starbucks regular during the height of the Starbucks moment—say, from 1998 to 2005 or so—was sure to have heard Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club and Brazil’s Sergio Mendes while waiting in line for a tall Caffè Verona or grande Guatemala Antigua coffee. Starbucks’ musical project sold the foreign and unfamiliar, exploiting yuppie and upper-middle-class desires for discovery and knowledge. That’s been a constant with the company and its music. But that doesn’t mean that Starbucks’ musical project hasn’t changed. Over the years, Starbucks has packaged its music and its explorations of the larger world in different ways, moving from the quest for discovery to sell the unfamiliar to using the aura of discovery to sell the familiar. 4
    SEARCHING FOR THE NEW
    I still remember him slumped over the record rack, the back of his checked thrift store jacket riding up and pinching him where his arms met his shoulders. He looked like an underwater diver. After staying bent down for a long stretch, he would pull up and call out across the crowded eight-by-twelve-foot store right off the pages of Nick Hornby’s
High Fidelity
.
    “Bry, do you know this band?”
    I learned long before then not to say yes to Bing, unless I really did know the band, and I usually didn’t.
    “No,” I called back softly, trying to hide my musical illiteracy from the store’s other well-informed record divers.
    Then Bing—his parents named him Justin—would turn to me and tell me about the band and its lineup changes, its history and back-ground, and who they sounded like. A mix between the Smiths and Big Star, or maybe the singer reminder him of a younger Eartha Kitt— another Bing favorite. After a few rounds of this, he would pick out an album or an EP, and we would head home.
    Later, in the living room of our second-floor walk-up apartment, we would make a pot of coffee and listen to the new music on our portable flip-top turntable with the sounds coming out of three-inch-high red plastic speakers.
    “So what do you think?”
    It went like this every week. Bing would read papers and magazines, listen to the radio, and talk to his friends, and then on Saturdays, we would go record shopping. Usually Bing came home with something I had never heard of or hadn’t heard in a long time. He loved turning me, or anyone else who stopped by the apartment, on to new stuff. I got to know some of my favorite music this way—Chris Bell, Curtis Mayfield, the Modern Lovers, the June Brides, the Replacements, the Stars of