OFF: Finding music

[Paul Mather]

On Wed, 26 Jun 1996, Christian Mumford wrote:

> Record stores shouldn't categorize music other than alphabetically....
> with the exception of rough divisions like classical, rock, jazz,
> (maybe) dance, and folk/country ,and, perhaps "world music" (including
> New Age).... all rock, despite outside influences, crossbreeding or
> subgenres should be firmly placed in the rock category. And the other
> categories  (with a little bit of musical knowledge, judgement and
> common sense...) should be placed in their respective categories.......
> After all, classical, rock, jazz and folk (including blues & country)
> are far more tangible categories than sub-categories like "progressive"
> or "punk" or "alternative" or whatever......

Heck, IMHO, I say dump *everything* together and categorise it
alphabetically.  It would make *my* life a lot easier, at any rate.  For
example, a while ago I thought my local shop had removed their "Hawkwind"
divider from the "Rock" section of the shelves (where it had been).  Boo,
hoo, I thought, until, a couple of visits later, I discovered it had
simply been moved to the "Garage, Surf 'n' Psychedelia" section (wherein
I was looking for some Bevis Frond).  In a similar vein, I always have to
check the "Jazz", "New Age", and "World Music" sections when looking for
stuff by Shankar, just to be sure (since his stuff appears to be randomly
filed amongst those three areas).

Filing everything together, alphabetically, would also (IMHO) increase the
chance of someone stumbling across something interesting, and thereby
increasing their musical horizons (and the record shop's sales).  I know
this happens to me quite often in the used bins (there it is even better,
as they have a "new arrivals" section, which I always scan, almost
religiously, actually:).  For example, recently I happened upon a CD
entitled _Hallucination Engine_ by Material, which caught my eye because
of the title and the cover.  Upon further investigation, however, I
discovered---to my delectation---one of the contributors was me ol' china,
Shankar (plus other Shakti alumni), and so into the ol' shopping basket
it went (after a quick in-store listen).  Actually, alphabetical + "New
Arrivals" sections for each letter of the alphabet would be great for the
regular releases, too.  It would mean more filing work for the staff,
but, heck, whatever happened to the old adage about the customer always
being right? ;-)

Cheers,

Paul.

obCD: _Dave Brock and the Agents of Chaos_

e-mail: paul at csgrad.cs.vt.edu                    A stranger in a strange land.