Late-Night Thoughts on Filing My
Record Collection
Quick! What kind of music is Kind of Blue? It’s
Jazz, of course. But the music’s so mellow and liquid, couldn’t we also
call it late-evening mood-music? Acoustic music would be an accurate description, not that
anyone would really call it that. We could simply call it American music -- or be socially
aware and call it African-American Art Music. Arrgghhh! This classification business is a
tricky thing.
The reason I’ve been thinking about it is that
I’ve been playing with a pair of Sony CDX-400 mega-changers recently (watch for my
review on November 1, 2000), which allow me to classify music into eight groups so that I
can, say, program the players to play at random all the discs in a given category -- such
as jazz, or rock, or oldies. Okay -- but what eight categories do I choose?
I’m from the South, so I was raised listening to
country, which is like fingernails on a chalkboard to some listeners -- such as my friend
Bob Reina, who once declared, "I like every type of music except country." Since
I know country is a rich and varied genre, I simply assumed Bob had never heard any
of the really good stuff.
Could Bob have been referring to Steve Earle, who writes
some of the most literate (and liberal) lyrics I’ve ever heard? Seems hard to believe
that he’d dismiss the author of "Ellis Unit One," one of the fairest and
most impassioned songs from Dead Man Walking. But maybe Bob wouldn’t consider
Steve Earle truly country. Even though he sings about many of the same themes that define
country and even though he uses acoustic guitars, banjos and mandolins (country
instruments), he does have an edgy attitude that many would identify as rock.
So what is it that defines the sort of country that people
like Bob don’t like? For that matter, what is it that defines country? This
isn’t an idle question -- I have many discs I don’t know how to classify.
Take one of my favorite bands, the Delevantes. They’re
one part Everly Brothers, one part Creedence Clearwater Revival and one part Bruce
Springsteen. Somebody thinks they’re country, because I first heard ‘em
on Country Music Television, which very briefly ran a video of "Pocketful of
Diamonds" in light rotation. I saw it and immediately had to know who are those
guys? I bought their album Long About that Time and decided that the Creedence
and Springsteen influences clearly made them rock musicians. Then one day, as I was
playing the disc in my car, Tom Norton climbed in and said, "Country music, eh?"
I was curious. "What makes you say so?" I asked. "Just about the only place
you hear acoustic guitars anymore is country music."
My friend John Atkinson says that it’s country if
that’s where the record store files it. This method of determination can get you in
trouble, however. If you shop on the internet, amazon.com doesn’t classify by
category. They have classical and popular music, that’s it. Besides, I used to work
at a record store that filed all traditional Irish music -- such as records by Planxty,
Claanad or the Chieftains -- under Ireland in the country bins. When I questioned
my boss about this, he responded, "Well, Ireland’s a country, ain’t
it?"
Silly as that answer is, it does bring up another issue and
that’s the transportability of any classification. To my boss, putting traditional
Irish music in country made a weird sort of sense, but I’m sure no customer ever
found that section without asking. I’ve known a lot of people who have chosen fairly
arbitrary filing schemes. I had a friend in Portland who filed his records alphabetically
-- by first name. This put Dylan in the Bs and Alice Cooper in the As (where I
think it properly belongs, since Alice Cooper is the name of the band, not a person -- but
that’s yet another arbitrary distinction).
When John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity
rearranged his record collection "autobiographically," I understood completely
-- when I moved into my first apartment I arranged all my records on a single long shelf
according to how they made me feel, ranging from peaceful to extremely energetic. Even my
roommates couldn’t locate most records using this system, but I bet anyone could have
pinpointed Kind of Blue instantly down there among the mellow masterpieces.
By the time I met my wife, I had settled on what I felt was
a simple, logical system -- all categories were mixed together in alphabetical order (by
last name), with multiple releases by the same artist in the chronological order of
release. And no pseudonyms were allowed -- Professor Longhair was Henry Roeland Byrd,
Muddy Waters was McKinley Morganfield.
Shades of Diner! It was, of course, a system that
was impossible for my wife to navigate once we combined record collections (read:
were married). She insisted I establish sections for jazz, classical, and rock. Naturally,
I found these categories confining and added others -- I’ve tried blues, folk,
gospel, country and African over the years. Some categories, such as blues, make sense and
have stuck around. Others, like country and African seemed simultaneously too-confining
and non-specific and I dropped them.
These days we have a catch-all section called folk, which
incorporates everything from field recordings of Hungarian gypsies (recorded by Bartok and
a thrilling record it is) to George Jones (yes, that’s where I put my country music).
Irish, African, Vietnamese and any other non-USian traditional musics are in there too,
rubbing shoulders with Bill Monroe and Joan Baez. It’s just a great big
ol’melting pot -- and since it is so broad, it’s almost meaningless as a
description of a specific type of music.
When categories become too broad, they lose focus. Both
Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane played jazz -- no one would dispute that. But you’d
never say the two created music that was the same. So let’s divide jazz into two
categories, mainstream for Hawkins and modern for Coltrane. That’s tidy enough -- but
which category encompasses John Coltrane Meets Coleman Hawkins? And then, where do
we categorize the singular genius of Louis Armstrong?
For that matter, where do we put Duke Ellington? His music
was through-composed with sections for soloists to improvise -- does the fact that
it’s written down make it classical? Don’t be ridiculous! Everyone knows
the Duke performed jazz.
When you get right down to it, the whole idea of
classifying music is absurd. John Cage said, "The very practice of music is a
celebration that we own nothing." Somehow I suspect that Cage might see my attempts
to codify musical forms as a ploy to own or control music. Perhaps he’s even right.
But we human beings seem to delight in classifying things.
We’re driven to it. I know at least eight different jokes that begin "There are
only two types of people …" Some of them are even funny -- no, that’s not
quite true. All of them are funny in the sense that we all know, of course, that
there are far more than two types of people.
Ulysses S. Grant said, "I only know two songs --
one’s the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and the other one isn’t." But
that’s rather too vigorous an application of Ockham’s razor -- we know
there are more than two types of music. Cage may be correct that we can never own music,
but there’s no question that when we own the CD, we need to create some kind of
order, no matter how arbitrary.
So you tell me -- do I file the Beatles under rock
or oldies?
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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