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Music and Categories (I):
An Interstitial Speculation on Record Collections
By Warren Senders
I began buying lps when I was around 12 or so, with money earned from household chores. I got pretty good at cleaning bathrooms. At a dollar a loo, it took me a while to accumulate enough for a serious shopping spree, but I used the time to think about what I was gonna buy.
I had a few records already: a couple of Pete Seeger albums, a recording of Pete's brother Mike doing old–timey Southern music (a parent in pre–Christmas rush no doubt figuring that all Seegers were acceptable to an 11–year–old), and some other odds and ends. But this was 1970, and I was 12, and I'd just been introduced to the music of Frank Zappa (oddly, by a music teacher in my junior high school), and it was time for me to enter the consumerist society on my own. Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Mothers of Invention, the soundtrack to "Woodstock" — I knew what would make me happy.
Always a forward thinker, I waited until I could really make an impact on the economy. With a hundred dollars' worth of bathrooms behind me, I went with my parents and younger brother on a Saturday shopping spree. I had plotted my purchases for so long that the actual act was anticlimactic. Knowing exactly where the discs were in the store, I walked in, selected my goodies, and carried them triumphantly to the cash register. I recall my mother looking distinctly skeptical at the sight of Zappa's Freak Out!, which I proudly showed her on the drive home.
In the beginning, sorting my collection wasn't hard. Fifteen or twenty discs present no major taxonomical problems. Whichever one was on the turntable at the time was at the front of the pile, and the current least–favorite was at the back. But I remember trying to organize my parents' record collection, and finding things a little more confusing.
I knew that classical music came in "composers" (though I doubt I could have told you what that meant), and I knew that performers' names were somehow different. Immediately: a problem. An all–Bach recording could be alphabetized under B, even if it was Landowska at the harpsichord...but what of a disc featuring Menuhin playing music by four different composers? Under M, I suppose. And Claude Bolling's "Two–Beat Mozart" — a surrealist rendering of Wolfgang A's greatest hits done as dixieland?
Among the Bach and Mozart there were a few items which my father had purchased for reasons of "cultural exposure" for me and my brother (never imagining that two decades later both of us would be deeply involved with African music!). The Music of the Dan, a tribe in West Africa, a Folkways assortment of African drumming, and others of similar ilk. Is "Dan" filed under D, and Africa under A?
I don't remember all the ad hoc solutions I found. It was irrelevant in any case; the six or seven discs my father actually listened to were always next to the player. The others provided a safe place for me to explore the problems of category, and were thus my introduction to the notion of interstitiality in the world of musical performance and artifact.
By the time I was fifteen I had over two hundred lps, and sorting them was more of a conundrum. Some were clearly linked by genre, others, just as clearly, not. To complicate things, I'd branched out, collecting jazz, blues and comedy along with rock. My solution was inelegant but effective: I alphabetized everything by the first word on the lp spine. The result was a marvelous confusion which negated all the constraints of idiom: Bobby "Blue" Bland was next to George Carlin who was next to Ornette Coleman who was next to Crosby, Stills & Nash. It worked perfectly. I always knew where everything was, and I enjoyed the serendipitous juxtapositions of genre that emerged as I contemplated my burgeoning collection. Jonathan Winters was next to Ben Webster, and if I felt like it I could shift directly from Granny Frickert's surrealist narratives to the breathy lyricism of the 20th century's most romantic saxophonist. Sometimes I felt like it; my friends never knew what to expect when I went to the stereo.
By age nineteen I'd extended myself still further, into what was then called "ethnic music." An older friend who worked in the music business got me access to all the records that were appearing on labels like Nonesuch Explorer, Lyrichord and Folkways — and Africa nestled beside the Allman Brothers, just a hop, skip and jump from Louis Armstrong.
My collection's organization provided a very high amount of information at one level, and almost none at another. It was a perfect method for me; I had a keen memory and a love of bizarre juxtapositions. I could retrieve anything within a minute or so, because I knew what I owned, and I remembered the keywords. To a casual browser, those boxes of lps were a source of bafflement. How were they organized? Many people didn't even recognize that it was alphabetical!
An alphabetic system can accept any input in the default phonetic system (what would I have done with an album titled in Arabic?). Because the sorting criteria were only tangentially related to those of genre, my record collection offered no single place to find a particular style (the sampler disc titled Jazz Jamboree was of course found under J, but fortuitous nomenclatural side–effects do not a general categorical structure make).
I knew that it wasn't the method that the record stores used. Whenever I went out on a buying expedition, I would visit particular parts of a store, guided by actual signs directing me to specific genres. It was clear that the commercial structures which guided manufacture and distribution of the music I loved didn't use the same criteria I did.
It's been a long time. Nowadays those big vinyl slabs are only
found in specialty stores — and CDs, which supplanted them in the 1980s, are now falling out of favor themselves; the students in my undergraduate classes are all downloading music, carrying whole libraries of songs on tiny technological wonders I can't even see. There is still a music business, however, and when I pop into what is still nostalgically called a record store, I bump up against some of the same problems of category. (Incidentally, I finally broke down about fifteen years ago and established some categories of genre; it was getting too hard to find things in a collection of over 700 lps.)
What I found on those first buying trips became truer and truer as the amount and variety of available music expanded: one store's categories weren't the same as another's. Some artists and styles seemed fixed; every store had Bach's music in the "classical" department, and John Coltrane's in "jazz." But there were always oddballs, artifacts that resisted easy classification. Was Carlos' Switched–On Bach to be found under B for Bach in the classical section...or in the small catch–all bin of "electronic music"?
The market undergoes transformations, depending on what's hot and what's not. In 1970, dance music from Jamaica was an exotic curiosity, found in the "ethnic music" categories when it was found at all. Ten years later, every blond suburban boy within sight was strumming a guitar and evoking Bob Marley's stuttering recollection of "oba–oba–obaserving the hypocrites;" "reggae" was a category unto itself, no longer generically "ethnic," but a real live genre with styles and substyles all its own.
Which is what happens to styles and forms of art that are both interstitial and commercially successful. Observe: reggae was the result of Jamaican musicians' encounter with American music; rhythmic structures were turned around, lyrics changed to address the musicians' concerns, instrumentation changed to accommodate the equipment that was available — and the result fermented in the Caribbean for a while before coming back to audiences in the US.
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