Project: Re-alphabetizing the CD's: A-C

If you visit Corporate Music Store© this week, you may find me working on one of my favorite pet projects: re-alphabetizing the music section. Our store has listening stations and customers often feel free to pick up a stack of CD's and bring them to one of the dozen (or so) listening stations scattered in the music section, descriminating by neither genre or proximity from original location. As a result, CD's are all over the place.

I enjoy finding these albums and putting them back because it returns me to my first favorite pastime when I was still a new-hire, that pastime being looking at the back of CD's and movies. I would always take at least twice as long to put shipment out because I wanted to read the backs of every album and every film. While this made me the least desirable part-timer to work with on a stressful night, it also made me fairly knowledgeable on everything sold in the store.

If you were to look at the layout of a decently representative Pop/Rock section, you would notice certain patterns emerge and certain idiosyncrasies that would challenge long-held beliefs on the nature of rock music.

For example:

-The traditional scope of the entire content of a Pop/Rock section (A-Z) cannot also be rightly described as ranging from "Abba to ZZ Top". Aaliyah would actually take top billing.

-It gets very boring looking at an entire section from beginning to end, but looking randomly gives you no real direction. I've been to Amoeba Music in San Francisco (which is easily the largest and most varied music store that I've ever been to) two times and the first time I got vertigo and almost threw up. I ended up with a handful of lackluster albums because I had no plan. It's more helpful to partition the section into 3 or 4 (or 5) sections and decide beforehand which to tackle first. You could, perhaps, divide the store from A-D, F-K, M-R, S (more on this soon), and T-Z. This makes the experience much more manageable, especially in larger store.

-Neil Young has far more albums than most give him credit for.

-So do the Rolling Stones,

-and Lou Reed.

-R.E.M. has far too many albums and I feel guilty for liking the songs that I like.

-"S" is by far the most popular first-letter for a band name. If you were in the 5th grade and wanted to make a unique and original bar-graph or pie-chart, make one based on the number of occurences of letters in the first place of band names. Go into a music store and you'll easily see that my findings are true.

-it's easy to get annoyed when flipping through the "Jackson" section.

-It feels cosmically incorrect for there to be a "Patti Smith" and a "Patty Smyth".


However, it was by going through the B's that I found a new pattern. The B's seem to have a higher degree of blues-y and earth-y bands.

Here's a sample list:

-The Black Crowes
-Blues Traveller
-Black Oak Arkansas
-Black Mountain
-Blackmore Knights
-Blind Melon
-Blind Faith
-Blue Oyster Cult (which is kind of unfair because I consider them more "spectral", but I guess that's a quality that some of the surrounding bands share)
-Jackson Browne
-Lindsey Buckingham
-Buffalo Springfield
-Jimmy Buffett
-The Byrds

It'd be hard to find a precise theme to tie thee bands all together, but if I were to try, I'd say "albums you'd find in a wood-panelled basement" or "lazy Bonnaroo playlist, volume 1b" or "music playing in a head shop". However, all of these acts either flourished in the late-60's-to-70's or wished they were still living in the late-60's-to-70's. Moreover, these bands aren't obscure acts. They are all fairly representative of their sub-section of music. I found the whole thing to be kinda weird.

My preliminary guess as to why so many of these groups are found in the "B's" predominantly have to do with the "B" sound. With regards to pronunciation, the "buh" sound is part of the labial (as opposed to the velar or dental) class, meaning that it reqires the lips to be pronounced. Furthermore, it is a voiced labial, and requires voice for pronunciation. The resulting sound is both defined and soft. It's also the first letter of the name for root movement that spawned all of these bands, namely the blues, even if it's of a folky variety. That "at home" feeling of the blues leaked into each of these bands, with all of them making a career out of the general approachability of their music.

A couple of other quick notes from alphabetizing the A-C sections:

-Who do Apocalyptica think they are? This Cello Quartet launched their career as a novelty group that exclusively covered Metallica songs. Their second album had more Metallica songs, with some Sepultura and Faith No More mixed in. Now they're a "legit" group with a drummer and tattoos. I will even go as far to say that they are the reason that there are 1,001 cheap orchestral/string quarted/piano tributes on the market today. They opened the floodgates in the modern era.

-I never knew we had an Argent CD in the store, but we do.

-Ashes Divide is project from another band I never cared about: A Perfect Circle. The only reason I know they exist is because a Def Jam rep from Manhattan calls every week and he kept trying to check the "buzz" on it. They guy is a nice guy but I'm sure his job often sucks. How often do people get suckered into the business side of the music industry because of free promo CD's and the promise of occasionally getting meet-and-greet passes for second and third tier rock bands? The music industry sucks.

-We have absolutely no used Allman Brothers Band albums.

-I have only recently just realized that the reformed (and John Fogerty-less) "CCR" called themselves Creedence Clearwater REVISITED, a play on the original Creedence Clearwater REVIVAL, even though this has stared me in the face for a lot of years.

-Man, it must suck to be Creed and to be remembered as being Creed.

-I think the Arcade Fire is pretty overrated but get away with it by having two dozen members in their band. No matter how lazy or lackluster a song, it'll always sound better with two dozen people playing it.

-I was forced to listen to the first All-American Rejects CD for about 2 months, totally against my will. In a Stockholm Syndrome-esque twist, I now kinda like it.

-Bjork is awesome, even though deep down I'm probably convincing myself that all of her music is awesome. Except her new album. That was pretty bad.

Yanni's "Winter" and unnamed Gladys Knight CD

This is a reconstruction of a scenario that happened between a customer and myself. Please excuse its fragmentary nature:

"Hi, did you find everything alright?"
-Yes [hands me Yanni and Gladys Knight CD's]

"Well, just so you know, we have a discount card where you can save 10% on all your purchases and 20% on your first purchase"
-[no response]

"That'll be $21.60"
-[looks at $5 dollar bill] They keep changing the color of my money.

"Haha, yeah, they do that."
-The people at work are [garble garble]...high tech. Problem is I'm a little bit higher than them.

[Nerviously]"Oh yeah?"
-[Silence]

"Here ya go." [hands bag of CD's to customer along with change]
-Top Gun!

Life of Agony's River Runs Red pt. 1

Today, I rang out a copy of Life of Agony's "River Runs Red" for a co-worker. If you're reading this and you're asking yourself a) who is Life of Agony or b) is this about the first plague that Moses delivered to Pharaoh, than the following might be hard to follow.

Life of Agony was (and I think still is, probably due in no small part to sentimentality) a band from the early/mid-90's who hailed from Brooklyn, New York. They also made an album that I'm willing to bet that I've sold more of than either Metallica's Black Album or Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", regardless of what Soundscan sells. Two things are a constant in the music business, at least as far as sales go: 1) semi-alienated guys in their early teens will discover Led Zeppelin and all of a sudden "get it", prompting them to buy Zep's first, second, fourth, and fifth albums (leaving the third and sixth albums for when they really get it and Presence and In Through The Out Door for when they really, really get it and/or they're bored) and 2) there will ALWAYS be people in the Albany, NY area who will want "River Runs Red".

When, then, is "River Runs Red"? In short, it was a really depressing hardcore-ish album. At its root, it seemed to appeal to people who were into New York Hardcore but I remember one of my neighbors being really into it two. He asked me to dub a tape copy for him for his car when I was a freshman in high school and he was a senior. He would drive me and his brother to school every morning, which was cool because him and his brother (who was my age) were the two coolest people I knew in my new school and I was overweight and into metal. We listened to it every other morning which would seem unremarkable if you didn't take into account that the other tape we listed to when we weren't listening to River Runs Red was Tim McGraw's "Not A Moment Too Soon". "This Time" and "Indian Outlaw" will always sound like 7am before school started. We would also have time for about half a song because it took about a minute-a-half to drive to school in the morning.

"River Runs Red" is the definition of palatable hardcore and if people were really honest with themselves, they'd recognize that it sounds like Godsmack with cleaner vocals. I hate Godsmack but strangely, I still like River Runs Red. It's the Never, Neverland of albums because it represents never growing up. It's probably more like a bad comic book convention because it also represents never growing up in the worst possible ways. The album deals with suicide and not conforming, even though what you could be conforming to is always ill-defined. I'll never really get what that brand of non-conformism really means. Rage Against the Machine (another band I hate) had a song called Killing in the Name where the last portion of the song was Zach de la Rocha repeatedly shouting "F*** you I won't do whatcha tell me!". I never really got he's being told to do but whatever it is, he probably won't do it. Ill-defined non-conformism is a mystery to me because "they" are always out to keep you down and "they" are "them".

One of my top 10 favorite rock moments in history (somewhere ahead of Faith No More on Saturday Night Live but definitely not ahead of the day Black Sabbath released "Sabotage") was when I was at a frat bar in Albany watching a cover band and they played Killing in the Name. They had one of their friends, a skinny guy in his 20's wearing a baseball hat and looking very serious, come up and sing the song. Besides the skinny kid in his 20's wearing a baseball hat emulating the hip-hop "stylings" of Zach de la Rocha to T, something which in itself was hilarious and heartbreaking all at once, the craziest part of the performance was the audience reaction. They all knew the song. This crowd was not a somber metal crowd or even a bunch of aged Gen-Xers. They were ostensibly frat and sorority types. They were all probably in college or college-educated. In other words: they had nothing to rail against. They had no idea who the "cha" in the "whatcha tell me" was and what they were telling them. Moreover, they were way more into singing along to this song than most audiences are when they're watching real bands. I wonder what the impromptu singer felt like after he preached the Gospel of Rage. I would hate to think that he felt like he "did his part" and somehow people "got it".

I keep thinking that I wish I had a Diet Pepsi. I think I was thirsty.

Why this site?

For some reason, I've always loved the Corporate Music Store©. This is mostly because a) I'm very sentimental, b) because I didn't have a license until I was 18 years old, and c) because Corporate Music Store© was all I had. The first reason is totally irrational. Wouldn't it make sense to move on and adopt a better way to get music? Aren't there other stores, and moreover, isn't everything for free on the internet?

Like I said, I'm totally irrational when it comes to sentimentality. There are a lot of reasons why I'd be attached to the 78X78 square feet of space that I've come to know as my beloved Corporate Music Store©, and one of them would be because I bought some of my favorite albums there and starting from Junior High leading all the way up to my senior year of high school, this one Corporate Music Store was the closest thing to having Disneyland in a 5 mile radius from my house, and that includes the Disneyland knock-off amusement park that is probably a mile from my house. The music store that I bought "Master of Puppets" and "Number of the Beast" is no longer in existence. The same holds true for the music store that I bought my copy of Faith No More's "Video Croissant" home video. However, the epicenter of almost all my most pivotal album purchases was at Corporate Music Store©. I'll always be sentimental for the place that I bought all 8 of the Ozzy-era Black Sabbath albums and the store I bought Alice In Chains' "Jar of Flies" EP. To me, it stands for something.

Again, this is totally irrational because it's a building and moreover, it's a building that just so happens to reside someplace really close to where I grew up and somehow managed to still make enough money to not close down. At the end, that's probably its most substantiated claim to fame: it hasn't gone out of business...yet. It's not cool, it's not pretty, it's hardly conveniently located (within a kind-of strip-mall), and it's certainly not cheap. It's just there. It's not remembered for being the place that I lost not one but TWO jobs because of (the first because I talked about working there so much that I didn't properly attend to my bagel-sandwich making duties and the second because I showed up to work at the music store the same day I blew off work at Office Max), or the place Justin Timberlake's mom came to in order to buy singles when N*Sync was in town. It's the kind of place that few are loyal to and hardly anyone will remember after its doors close.

Except me, because I'm way too sentimental.

Who am I?

My name is Tom and I've worked for Corporate Music Store(s)© for nearly 10 years, mostly as a part-time "sales associate" (which is all together the kindest and most sterile description of a "clerk" ever created), but in the last couple years I've served primarily as an assistant manager. I recently returned to Corporate Music Store© after an absence. Due to the break, the normally indiscernible slow boil of undesirable change is now apparent.

What is Corporate Music Store?

Corporate Music Store© (CMS) is a site dedicated to syndicated art, determined by Soundscan©, whose actual value is determined by capital.

If you've wondered what's happened to your neighborhood music store over the last decade, the answer is simple: it is now a Corporate Music Store©.

Check back often!