Inside, this cool little room felt as hushed and reverent as the religious-studies section of a university library, but at the same time, its thrilling options for every proclivity put me in mind of a sex shop’s DVD back room. Among Bob’s collection you could find Beethoven’s sonatas or big-booty bass, Nas or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It took me a minute to crack the code of exactly how it had all been arranged, by an ethnomusicology PhD student at NYU who’d once interned at Rivington, but eventually I got a rough idea of the organizing principles—historical period, genre, subgenre, artist.
