Rant: I hate you Indie Genre Tag.

I listen to a lot of music. By a lot of music I mean I border on obsession. I listen to every kind there is, all the time I'm not playing it. Before you can say "Everything? Who does this guy think he is?" I will tell you this. My last few procurements are a collection of ancient Chinese folk songs, some Blur albums (Parklife is great by the way, very 80's in spots) and bunch of old ragtime records I found in a thrift store. So I'm into it, hardcore ya know?

A few years ago my CD collection had grown to an unmanageable size and I decided it was time to rip the whole thing into MP3. It took me about 2 years to get through it all but it was totally worth it. Now I had most of my music in a searchable index and I was pleased. Soon as my collection grew beyond it's original 60GB size it started getting harder and harder to search so I decided that it was time to start tagging all of my music. The only fields open to me were Artist, Album and Genre. I groaned, I wailed, I pulled on my hair and finally sat down and started creating genres for my music.

I hate genre. I hate it with a burning passion, I think it's a terrible way of describing music in any but the broadest of terms. So I stick with some pretty broad terms; Opera is easy to distinguish from Punk Rock, Hip-Hop sounds very different from Mexican Bolero etc. The real bitch of it comes in truly modern music. Where the hell do I put Devotchka? They're a Gypsy/Bolero rock band from Denver for fucks sake. Genre? They want nothing to do with it, just enjoy. What about Beck? Every album sounds like a new street drug I've never tried and any attempt to file it in my collection feels wrong.

Alas a gigantic music collection requires some organizing or I'll find myself back with my CDs, staring at a giant cluster fuck of boxes and buying the same album three times in one year because I don't think I own it. So I can either create a genre tag for every Balkan Beat Box that keeps scribbling outside of genre lines or I can try and group some of this crap together so I can find it. Recently a genre tag that I truly despise is creeping into my digital music.

Indie.

I hate you, Indie genre tag. You are a method for distributing music, not a damn genre. You describe nothing, but so much of what I'm all about these day keeps landing in this pile. Again, Devotchka? Where the hell do you go Devotchka? Beyond creating a specific genre for Ukranian/Mexican Rock I can find little else to place them in. Maybe rock, but it still doesn't fit quite right. I'm not rocking out while I listen to them, I rock out when I hear The Black Keys. Or to make things worse, where am I to file Beirut? Gypsy-folk? AAAARG!

I've tried replacing the Indie tag with a few others and I've managed to extract Indie Pop and Psychedelic into their own categories but honestly it's painful work and not something I'm interested in spending a lot of time laboring over. I want to enjoy my music, not spend a couple hundred hours organizing it. That is the exact reason I went to MP3s so long ago, it's supposedly very convenient. Prove it to me MP3s, be more convenient.

I want music playing software that allows me to write in my own fields and then populate them with data that matters to me. Like what kind of sex goes good with this particular Leonard Cohen collection, or what color fruit reminds me of this Animal Collective track. I want emotional tagging. I want to be able to ascribe a mood to every track and every album in my library so when I'm feeling pissy I can just scroll down through my Ani Difranco records and listen to all the tracks tagged as "Pissy". Where's my Magical iPod that can do all of this? Damn you Indie genre, damn you for being useful and annoying.

Fuck it, someone please just take a picture of me every time I play Gulag Orkestar and tell me where it should be filed.

Thanks for listening to me rant,
Eriq Nelson.

Prose: An Introduction By Way Of A Lesson

Hello everybody, I'm Eriq Nelson

For seven years I worked at the Tower Records here in Richmond VA and I loved damn near every minute of it. It paid my bills (kind of) and it introduced me to some incredible people (very true!). More than anything, it broadened my mind to an unspeakable variety of music. For the area I grew up in, the decaying working class suburbs of Richmond, I had a pretty catholic taste in music. Ani Difranco, Rancid and Tool were my favorite bands coming out of high school and I knew jazz. I thought I knew jazz. I thought I had a broad taste in music. Wow, was I wrong.

Well, I wasn't totally wrong. For the time and place I had been, I was a pretty broad minded dude. The fact that I had a woman singer in my CD collection was pretty outlandish. The first weeks at Tower proved to me how narrow my tastes really were. I met people with knowledge and experience in music so far beyond my reckoning that they appeared near inhuman. I met customers and employees who blew my mind clean in half with the depth of their knowledge about jazz, classic rock, zydeco, African funk and a thousand other genres of music. I listened, I learned and I soaked it all in.

In time, I had been brewing in music long enough that I could start really helping our customers out. I could give them advice about new albums, recommend classics to people, find live albums and deep cuts they might not know about and generally keep them happy with what was in their CD decks. It wasn't always easy, there were plenty of rude people that didn't want anything to do with what was outside of their tastes. It bothered me sometimes, I love music more than almost anything else there is. Eventually I realized that there was nothing I could do for these people, and I let them on their way.

There was another disease running through the record store. It infects knowledgeable employees, it breeds on blogs, Facebook and it's spreading into your local vinyl resellers, one stops and bars. Its name is Indie Snobbery. No one wants to talk about it but the silence must be broken. Not to complain about it's existence, bitching about it's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but you'll never get anywhere. No, No there's been enough bitching. Instead, I will give you A Lesson.

Meet Mark. Mark is a typical suburban white guy, works in an office, is 35 or 36 and has a pleasant wife. He shops at Tower about three times a month and comes in to buy a pretty demographically typical spread of pop/rock and light jazz records. No one pays him any mind, no one really talks to him. He is a ghost.

One afternoon I see a new hire giving our buddy Mark the "eyeball roll" as he asks for help. I hate the eyeball roll. I recognize the signs of a customer about to walk out so I stroll over to see if I can help. Turns out, Mark was looking for something like Chris Botti. Now for those who don't know, Chris Botti doesn't play the most despicable form of smooth jazz, but he flirts with it. Right, I'm not a fan at all.

I might not like Chris Botti, or even really want to deal with a guy who counts himself as a fan, but I helped Mark out. I turned him onto Stan Getz, who is a fantastic bossa nova and samba sax player and worked throughout his career with some of the biggest names in jazz. I didn't push him off on whatever top selling crap was there, I listened and I learned, I took the time to meet Mark.

In the three years that he was my customer, he blossomed. By the time I left Tower, he was listening to Herbie Hancock, Lonnie Smith, Michael Brecker and a host of other influential jazz players as well as getting him out to local shows from our jazz scene. I snuck some post-rock in there as well. A touch of Sigur Rós to whet the appetite. So the question here is this: Is it better to turn someone on to good music for the rest of their life or feel smugly superior for your incredible taste for a moment?

No. It is a far better thing that has a lasting effect on the world to open up to people, be patient and understanding and really talk to them about music. If we all really want to support independent musicians, local culture, and editorial independence then it must be a culture of inclusion. There is no way to support yourself as an artist without selling your work to people you might not like. The same is true of those who follow and enjoy these artists. Sometimes they suck, they're narrow minded, they don't know anything. I always remember my first day at Tower, wandering around lost in those huge stacks of music. I am those guys.

Thanks for reading,
Eriq Nelson.

And Assorted Ramblings here: The Temple Of The Forbidden Beat