A few weeks before I started my freshman year at this university, a group of friends and I had dinner with an old teacher, a burly, long-haired Russian man prone to chain-smoking, playing show tunes on an old electric piano and, frequently, chain-smoking while playing show tunes on an old electric piano.
 
When he learned I would soon be moving to College Park, this teacher, who had spent a good part of his life as a gigging musician and actor around Washington, had only one piece of advice. He didn’t tell me to focus on my schoolwork, make new friends or learn to use the Metro.
 
Instead, he put a leather jacket-clad elbow on the table, looked me in the eye and put a Maverick cigarette to his lips.
 
“You’ve got to check out CDepot,” he said. “You’ll love it.”
 
I kept his advice in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t until recently that I felt the need to act on it; it’s junior year and time is slipping away, after all. Better enjoy the best weird, uniquely College Park experiences while I still can.
 
So, with that in mind, I recently threw on a baseball T-shirt, grabbed my wallet and set off on Route 1, determined to come back with an album and a story.

* * *

CDepot

From the outside, CDepot is totally unassuming, another gray storefront in the barren wasteland north of the campus, a short drive beyond the comforting undergraduate safety of the University View and The Varsity.

It’s squeezed in next to Sakura Seafood and Supreme Buffet, a Japanese place that is, evidently, insanely popular (if the constant stream of people pouring in and out at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday was any indication). CDepot also looks surprisingly small. Its no-nonsense sign promises “New, Used, R&B, Jazz,” and it’s hard to believe the narrow building can house even that.

Push through the glass doors, plastered with charmingly hand-drawn signs. One is a message to like the store on Facebook. Another has a reminder that April is record store month (which isn’t technically true — Saturday is Record Store Day, though, and CDepot will be participating, according to recordstoreday.com). Then, CDepot opens up into another world entirely.

Long and narrow, the shop is surprisingly huge (8,000 square feet, according to CDepot’s website), and seemingly every inch of it is put to use. Open boxes of vinyl LPs cover the threadbare floor, while huge racks of CDs and DVDs run, seemingly forever, along the walls and through the center of the gray and blue space. Old records and posters hang in frames above the racks, and DVD box sets pile up behind the cashiers’ counter.

The effect is chaotic and overwhelming, to say the least. Vaguely industrial and buzzing with the (not unwelcome) hum of a way-too-strong air conditioner, the sensation is a little like going into a Home Depot: Though everything is arranged according to some system, you can’t quite grasp what that system is and you forget what you came in for the moment you enter.

So you just start walking around.

CDepot

* * *

Songs that I notice playing over the excellent sound system as I browse through the racks: a song I can’t immediately place by the Jackson Five and Junior Murvin’s version of “Police & Thieves.”

* * *

The nostalgia surge from browsing through the loaded CD racks is astonishing.

Nothing can prepare you, for example, for stumbling across the hard copy of Daniel Powter’s 2005 self-titled album — you know, the one that graced the world with the blessedly cheesy soul-pop of “Bad Day” and literally nothing else. I doubt Powter himself could name another cut off that album.

Or to have your fingers flip through Good Charlotte’s entire discography and remember how you saved your money to buy both versions of the thoroughly mediocre The Chronicles of Life and Death, a pair of albums that were identical save for exactly one song.

But then, CDs themselves are really nothing but nostalgia, and CDepot is a warehouse full of them. Is any other form of physical media as thoroughly, inextricably linked to a time period as CDs are to the late ’90s and early 2000s? Cool kids still make cassettes and fetishize vinyl, but CDs? Who are they for?

Making a mixtape is an impressively complicated labor of love. Making a CD is treated like a chore. Making a Spotify playlist is meaningless.

CDepot

* * *

An illustrative anecdote:

While I pore over rows of CDs looking for Jawbreaker’s major label debut (which, spoiler alert, I don’t find), an older man behind me shouts out “Bingo!” while flipping through a rack of soul CDs. I turn just in time to catch the look of sheer, unadulterated happiness across his lined face.

I try to find that same kind of spontaneous, unexpected joy while letting my MP3 player shuffle on the way home. For some reason, I can’t.

* * *

CDs are forever tied to an incredibly specific cultural moment, one we all seem to want to forget; we still gush over our parents’ vinyl collections and Woodstock memories, but absolutely no one is trying to capitalize on Woodstock ’93 nostalgia. No one wants to remember Creed and everything it stood for.

Except, it seems, for CDepot. At the risk of sounding patronizing, it’s a blue-collar store utterly unconcerned with seeming hip or essential. Walk in, and you could easily be walking into 2002, save for a few discs (Green Day’s thoroughly misconceived ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! are nestled right alongside Kerplunk, for instance) or the occasional ring of a cellphone.

It’s a welcome change of pace. I start to feel self-conscious in my T-shirt and skinny jeans, but not in the way I do in record stores in Washington or Chicago; in other stores full of collectors and vinyl fetishists, I consistently feel judged and looked down on, deemed not cool enough by a jury of my peers. In CDepot, I’m afraid I’m the one trying too hard. 

CDepot

* * *

I don’t spend too much time perusing DVDs, but I do linger over a section at the back of the store labeled “Budget Martial Arts,” complete with such gems as Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Swordsman, Secret Rivals 3, Swordsman II and Everlasting Chivalry.

* * *

There are a few people meandering around the store with me. One, the cashier who eventually scans my same-as-new copy of J Roddy Walston and the Business, is an incredibly pleasant, helpful man with big eyes, a brown beard and a black polo.

The other customers are as diverse as College Park gets; a tall man in a full suit looks at DVDs while a father with two kids looks at Led Zeppelin CDs and eventually leaves with a box set of the Indiana Jones movies.

Save for the music playing, CDepot is quiet, but the energy is unmistakably friendly. And it quickly but noticeably stops feeling like I’m in College Park.

CDepot is a throwback in more ways than one; it’s not just a temple (or burial ground?) for a form of physical media that long ago breathed its last gasp. It’s not just a site of nostalgia for older dudes who still rock ponytails, like my old teacher.

CDepot, shaggy and strange, is really a monument to College Park itself — or one side of College Park, at least: the side that is seedy, weird and just a little bit dangerous. The side that doesn’t have a Starbucks and a Chipotle on every corner. The side that a lot of us, in our time at this university, happily choose not to see.

Maybe that was the advice my teacher meant for me to glean: Step off the beaten path, take the time to explore while I still have the chance, get outside my comfort zone and find a place where not everyone dresses or thinks exactly like me.

Or maybe he just really wanted me to go to a place where I could find three mint-condition Elton John LPs for less than $20.

* * *

We value vinyl records — and used to value CDs — because of their materiality, because they are more authentic than the zeros and ones we drag-and-drop into the cloud and onto our phones. Maybe that’s an accurate assessment, or maybe that’s hipster garbage (because I wrote it, I would lean toward garbage).

Still, in a college town full of chain restaurants and cookie-cutter apartment buildings, CDepot feels real. It’s messy, it’s out of the way and it doesn’t seem to care how you feel about it.

It’s not “cool.” That’s why it’s cool.

CDepot