You can tell a lot about how old a person is if they recognize the term "high fidelity." Or, as it was known in the days when vinyl was king, "hi-fi." Some 30 years ago, I worked in a record store where this weird little guy kept coming in, buying really weird records -- Australian Marching Band music, stuff like that -- and then returning them as defective. When asked what was wrong with the records, he replied, "They don't have that 'fi" to them." "'Fi'?" "Yeah. You know, hi-fi," he replied, whereupon he was forcefully ejected from the store and banished forever.

I thought of this when I heard about a new movie titled "High Fidelity," concerning, at least ostensibly, the goings-on in a used record shop. And I thought about it again while listening to the soundtrack. The soundtrack ain't perfect, by any means, but give these guys 'A' for effort.

For one thing, any soundtrack -- or compilation, or album, of any sort -- that starts out with a one-two punch of 13th Floor Elevators, and the Kinks is at least worth a listen. The Elevators, the Swiss-cheese brainchild of Roky Erickson, were all over AM radio in the mid-60s with "You're Gonna Miss Me," a speedfreak rant that opened up Erickson's already acid-casualty thought processes for the world to see. If my generation had learned from his example the number of incoherent living dead rambling and mumbling on the streets of this nation's major cities would undoubtedly be reduced by 3/4. Then there's the Kinks. In the '60s, you liked the Beatles; if you were cool, you liked the Stones; and if you were hip, you liked the Kinks. Incapable most times of completing a concert without inflicting fisticuffs and great heaping mouthfuls of abuse upon each other, the Kinks were the thing. "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy," included here, strayed a bit from their usual style but was released as an A sided single which, alas, never went anywhere.

What is interesting about the High Fidelity soundtrack is that, after this introduction, the CD functions basically as a primer to how influential The Velvet Underground has been upon popular music. While the Velvets are well-represented here with two tracks from the LOADED album ("Oh! Sweet Nothin' " and "Who Loves the Sun") the influence of the band's earlier sound is heard on High Fidelity on offerings from smog ("Cold-Blooded Old Times") The Beta Band ("Dry the Rain") and the Nico-tinged "Le Boob Oscillator" from Stereolab. There is also the junkie-tinged aura which hovers around such tunes as "Always See Your Face" by Love and "Most of the Time" by Bob Dylan, who, of course, has influenced the state of popular music a time or two himself.

Not a bad selection, by any means. My only quarrel -- and it is picky, I admit -- is that almost all of the artists represented have work which is equally obscure, but better. Again, however, this is probably nitpicking and certainly subjective. What is interesting about the "High Fidelity" soundtrack is that it is no stretch at all to play it and imagine yourself hearing it in a record vinyl shop near any mid-sized campus in the country. If that was the aim of the soundtrack guys, kudos to them. They succeeded. Recommended.