You are not the music you listen to or the clothes you wear. But protagonist Rob doesn't understand this. Championship Vinyl and Barry and Dick were funny (because they were authentic) but unlike before, Rob seems like a self-centred ponce who doesn't understand that the women he falls in and out of love with are real people?? 
 I remember loving this when I read it a couple of years ago. I didn't this time, though. 
 Nonetheless, I understand this as a snapshot of male-ness. The book also has a lot of value as a discussion on music as an experience and part of life, as a mirror and an ideal and everything. 
 What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all these records turn you into a melancholy person?(p. 18) 
 Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school including music.(p. 65) 
 'Do you know that expression, "Time on his hand and himself on his mind"? That's you.' (Laura, p. 203)