So I’m pretty out-of-control in the record-buying department lately, and I when I tried playing my old cassette of The Jackie Wilson Story the other day and found out that its particles had gone the way of all well-loved cassettes, I headed on down to the local bring-yer-used-CD’s-here corporate monstrosity to get a new one. They didn’t have it in their new CD section, and they didn’t have it in their used soul/R&B/urban section, either (though they did have 750 copies of Tupac Shakur’s All Eyez On Me, which, like every other Tupac Shakur CD there, was priced at $27.99. You’ll forgive my language, but what the fuck is this? Every God-damned wiseacre with a laptop and an assistantship at UC Berkeley wants me to know that Tupac was the greatest emcee that ever lived, redefining line-lengths and using language with an improvisatory sophistication unmatched since the time of Homer, etc. etc., but how can I find it out for myself at these kinds of prices? I am all kinds of foolhardy with my money, but I think I have finally located my limit: it’s being asked to fork over thirty bones for a two-hits-and-probably-lots-of-filler used CD by a popular artist. Somebody tape me this stuff, wouldja, or burn me a copy? I hate being out of the loop). But you know and I know that the clerks at these kinds of stores know as much about music as I know about particle physics, so instead of asking the young man reading Nintendo Power at the counter, I checked in “Used Rock.”