After taking a week to relocate a mile west of its original storefront, a hip-hop record shop in Hilltop is back in business.
The Kutt Records reopened Saturday in its new location — situated at 3058 W. Broad St. — with weekly hours Wednesday-Sunday from noon to 7 p.m., according to the store’s Instagram page. Store owner Zachary Grashel, known in Columbus’ hip-hop community as “Zerggy Zerg,” said the unexpected move was the result of his original storefront — located at 2358 W. Broad St. — being purchased for commercial redevelopment.
“It’s a beautiful word called gentrification,” Grashel said. “A group of people decided they wanted to purchase the block in which my store is located, and they didn’t want to tell us until it happened. Their plan is to demolish the block and put up something similar to a high-rise situation.”
Grashel said for him, it was important for his store to remain in the Hilltop neighborhood, where he grew up and continues to live.
“I could’ve easily been the sixth record store on campus,” Grashel said. “The whole reason I put the store out here is because everybody complained about this neighborhood my whole life, that [it] had never had anything, and nobody ever wanted to try to do something about it. For me, it was about being able to do something for the community.”
Grashel said he first opened The Kutt Records in June 2023 as a space dedicated to hip-hop culture.
“The Kutt Records was the thing I pipe-dreamed in a month, then did,” Grashel said. “It was nuts, man. I started the store with no plan.”
After acquiring a loan, Grashel said he went around town hunting for inventory, digging through garage sales and scouring “the mean streets of Facebook Marketplace” for records that would fit the store.
“The crux of it all was just learning how to do a bunch of stuff I never did before,” Grashel said. “It’s getting the records, but it was also learning how to build shelves, and finding a building was a whole ‘nother challenge.”
The new location is larger than the old store, Grashel said, and features an expanded dance floor that can host community events, concerts and breakdancing competitions.
On the store’s opening day, The Kutt Records hosted an opening day after-hours breakdancing competition to break in the new space, with breakdancers young and old throwing down for the chance to win a $1,000 cash prize.
Grashel said the event and prize were organized in partnership with Motor City Street Dance Academy — a Detroit-based dance studio and community outreach organization that offers dance lessons, youth programs and music and art programs — as a way to give the community a more authentic idea of what breaking culture is.
Benito “Mav-One” Vasquez, founder and executive director of MCSDA, said he wanted to contribute to the event to bring more people into the hip-hop culture he grew up with.
“Just to be able to get down and hang out with each other and enjoy music, I think, is one of the best, most beautiful things to experience,” Vasquez said. “We wanted to create this thing where all different cultures, backgrounds, religions, creeds, identities, everything, can just very naturally get together and compete.”
Unlike more conventional bracket-style competitions that pit dancers against one another — as seen in the 2024 Paris Olympics, for example — Grashel said the competition was organized as a cipher, where dancers could organically compete with each other.
“The cipher is everything. Hip-hop is a cipher. The cipher is the circle in which hip-hop happens,” Grashel said. “In breaking, we use a cipher to exchange or battle; it’s literally just a circle of people where you can go in, exchange with somebody, battle, you can go off of somebody. It’s the physical form of hip-hop.”
Grashel said he wants The Kutt Records to be a place that expands people’s understanding of hip-hop beyond what they hear on the radio or see in the mainstream.
“When I say hip-hop, I don’t mean like my store is full of Nas or Wu-Tang. A lot of stores have bigger hip-hop sections than I do,” Grashel said. “What the store does is to show the context of what hip-hop really is. When you’re flipping through these records, these are the same records that the kids in the ‘70s were finding in their parents’ record collections and using to create the unbeknownst soundtrack of what would become hip-hop.”
Grashel said he wants to use the new space to allow people to explore all the elements of hip-hop as a culture, and to transcend the idea of what a record store can be for its community.
“I wanted to give people kind of a place that we all wish we had when we were kids,” Grashel said. “You can break in here, you can DJ in here, you can rap in here. You can see graffiti in here and get inspired [by] the people that come in here regularly, have conversations with them about the records that they buy.”
One such regular is Jason Rawls, an assistant professor of hip-hop in Ohio State’s School of Music. Rawls — also a prolific hip-hop producer who has worked with the likes of Talib Kweli, Mos Def and Slum Village — said it’s important that places like The Kutt Records exist because they preserve and broaden the ideas of what hip-hop is and can be.
“Having record stores is a place of culture,” Rawls said. “You know, [Grashel] even says that, ‘Not just a record store.’ When you come to the record store, it’s a place of gathering and, you know, [exchanging] ideas. It’s just a good feeling, a good place to be.”
For more information about The Kutt Records, including updates on upcoming events, visit the store’s Instagram page.
