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.