This Record Store Talk Show Is My Favorite Thing on the Internet

How does one begin to explain Zohran Mamdani’s visit to Village Revival Records earlier this week? First, by clarifying that it wasn’t actually him—it was an impersonator, a guy named Neel, apparently, who doesn’t even look like Zohran but did manage to fool a couple of customers from Chicago. You see, Jamal had gotten tired of Erma and William hosting their dating show on the couch, and told them they had to stop unless they could convince the mayor to come in. Then William got Zohran’s phone number from Kareem, who does actually know him, but tricked William into texting the impersonator instead. And now Kareem says he might get the real Mamdani to come anyway, but only if the dating show moves out. Get it? 

This has all transpired over the last week or so on Revival of the Fittest, a talk show of sorts set in the beloved downtown Manhattan record shop Village Revival. Jamal Al-Nasr, who owns the shop, is a classic NYC character—a charismatic and benevolent wiseguy who smokes cigs while holding court behind the counter, who spoke no English when he moved to the city from Jordan (and Palestine before that) in the ’90s and taught himself the language by listening to records. (For more on Al-Nasr and Village Revival, there’s a great Pitchfork feature by Sim Tumay from a few years back, which Ryan commissioned and I edited.) Al-Nasr is a fixture of the Instagram channel of New York Nico, the photographer and videographer born Nicolas Heller, known for showcasing the lovable eccentrics who make the city great. In December, Heller launched Revival of the Fittest as a show with its own IG account, letting the camera roll while Al-Nasr and a cast of other scrappy New Yorkers chop it up together, then posting the results in daily two-minute chunks.

The average episode consists of a few people standing around, bickering and cracking jokes about nothing in particular in a rapid-fire chorus. Given the setting, music comes up a lot, but it’s far from the only topic. The profound and the banal alike are all brought up for debate: Barbra Streisand, mental illness, race relations, whether that bug flying around is a butterfly or a moth. (I’d say the subject matter is about 30 percent music, 70 percent other stuff.) The cast features the occasional internet microcelebrity or indie-famous musician, including a lot of people we love at Hearing Things: Judah Weston, Lip Critic, and Wiki have all made appearances. But the real stars are ordinary people. Rob Brender is an Iron Maiden superfan with manic depression, a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and an arsenal of crass jokes that are too corny to cause any real offense. Erma Camporese, the Italian aunt I wish I had growing up, might be the gang’s coldest shit-talker, with a tough exterior and a sweet center, like a cannoli in leopard print and heels. 

Heller’s cinematography style is iPhone vérité. The camera flies around to keep up with the pace of the conversation, its frantic motion conveying the sense that you’re there in the shop, your head on a swivel. “The pace of this conversation is sublime. This is my Wimbledon,” wrote one commenter on an episode that zooms from discussion of the hydrating properties of urine to the racism of John Wayne to the film career of Donnie Wahlberg. Another commenter, on an impassioned conversation between Brender and the comedian Mario Bosco about whether human nature is fundamentally good or evil: “It’s like watching Socrates and Plato in real time.”