HOW I ORGANISED MY RECORD COLLECTION (AND FINALLY BROUGHT ORDER TO THE GALAXY)

There’s a point in the film Hi Fidelity where John Cusack’s character sinks into a depressive slump and tries to get out of it by comprehensively recategorising his entire record collection. That one little scene made me a laughing stock for years, despite the fact that I’ve always been record collecting small fry, with a mere 943 alphabetically arranged compact discs in my active collection. Luckily, now that record collections have ceased to be normal, I’ve gone from laughing stock to charming anachronistic crank overnight. It’s finally safe to max it up a gear.

Actually, I’ve been feeling my love for music has been getting a bit stale over the years. I think that the reason is that my music taste’s a little too diverse. I’d always been proud to have George Clinton, John Coltrane, Company Flow, Comus, Conflict and the Congos all next to each other on my creaking shelves. It certainly had its advantages. Just imagine you’re an attractive girl and you come home with me to find P funk next to avant-garde jazz next to hip hop next to acid folk next to awful crusty punk next to roots reggae. You’d be pretty wet right? Sorry, of course you wouldn’t – you’d be ridiculously wet. I’m feeling pretty sexy just writing this stuff.

But aside from its powerful and occasionally deadly aphrodisiac effect, my collection was getting to be a pain in the arse. How do you pick what you want to listen to when your collection is that size and that jumbled? I ended up just listening to the Kinks all the time. Just copping out. Browsing was just an effort. So I took a step back and had a long look at my life and how it had all turned out wrong. There I was, 25 years old, weighed down by 943 CDs which just sit there, taking up a ridiculous amount of space; I barely listen to half of them and, with mp3s nowadays, who the hell needs CDs anyway? The answer was obvious; change was needed. I had to recategorise my collection.

In Hi Fidelity, Cusack is really pushing the boundary by reclassifying his records autobiographically. That’s the ‘wow’ system apparently. Bullshit. The truth is that different systems work for different collections. Cusack’s is all pop and classic rock. All of it. What a walk in the fucking park. What a fucking loser. For a rock based collection, alphabetical classification actually works. Better than that, you could use chronological. Autobiographical is only tough if all your music’s from the sixties. But for a collection like mine, which covers genres, autobiographical is just a cop-out. I got into hip hop in Winter 2002, so all my hip hop CDs are from the 02-05 period. By then I’d bought all the classics and it was just a matter of coasting. And it goes on: reggae – Summer 2003, black metal – 2000. I get into a genre, I stage a takeover, then I move on. That’s how it is. Deal with it. For my collection, autobiographical categorisation would just be genre-based, but lame. Plus, this wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about the music.

Chronological is a pretty good system. Like alphabetical it’s objective and it’s quantifiable. But it doesn’t work at all for collections. Chronological's nice because you can see the progression: rock'n'roll flows into British invasion, which grows into the psychedelic era, which then matures into prog before the punk backlash hits. The downside is that the pop chronology gets pretty laboured once you're into the 80s, when rock counter-culture unity breaks down for good. Once the 'Disco Sucks' movement had split rock down the middle into its first two camps: dancey and rocking, chronological just gets more and more of a pointless hassle. Imagine a chronological approach to 90s music and you'll see what I mean: you'd have Nirvana, Ice Cube, Aphex Twin and Darkthrone all rubbing shoulders: that's not progression, it's disintergration. That ruled out chronological, for my collection at least.

So I took the plunge. I decided that what my life needed was for me to embark on a comprehensive program of genre-based recategorisation. Genre-based categorisation, or its subjective counterpart mood-based categorisation, is actually pretty good for people with more socially acceptable record collections of say 250 CDs. It’s easy because you’d only really have two genres max. Hey, I used to order it like that myself. But when you’re looking at upwards of ten genres, genre-based becomes tough. Sensible, but tough. That’s why I’d originally moved into the placid waters of alphabetical classification. But alphabetic wasn’t working for me. The recategorisation was all about changing my life by reminding me of the things that I most loved. I needed to return to the font. That’s why my collection had to become genre based again. I couldn’t go into this thing unprepared. So I did what came naturally and drew up a comprehensive excel spread sheet.

So... genres. I started by allocating all my CDs to a ‘class’, to supergenres if you will. The ones that were obvious were classical, rock, jazz, hip hop, dancehall, world, dance/electronic and folk. These classes would be separate from one another. They’d be like sections in a record store. I was on to a good thing. In my most fevered dreams I saw visions of plastic dividers, setting one class off from the other, sheltering the genres within their nestling plastic arms. Ranks and ranks of them, with type-written labels. It was how St Teresa must have felt. I was flying high, but I had to come down sooner or later.

Problems began immediately. To start with, there are a whole lot of liminal genres. Jazz that is avant-garde would obviously in the jazz section. But what about free improv? Where would my John Zorn and Derek Bailey (may he rest in peace) albums go? What about folk music? Is Leonard Cohen folk? No. Is Dylan folk? A bit. What about Donovan? Pentangle? Devendra Banhart? Jesus. I definitely needed some sort of folk section, because an enormous chunk of my collection is smelly pre-war WW2 music made by blind hillbillies, but what would go there and what would go in rock baffled me. That was problem number one. The second problem was just as serious: how to deal with rock, which still occupies the lion’s share of my collection. I decided to take it down a peg by having separate punk, metal and soul/funk classes and by siphoning off all my British folk rock into a newly formed ‘roots’ class covering pre-war folk, post-war stuff made for a specialist audience (the Seeger crowd etc), and British folk revival stuff. My final class list looked like this:

• Classical
• Dance/Electronica
• Hip hop
• Jazz
• Metal
• Punk
• Rock
• Roots
• Soul/Funk
• World

Great. On a roll. The next step, the one I was really looking forward to, was the genre part. I decided to go with several ‘genres’ within each ‘class’, which would be subdivided into further ‘sub-genres’. I’ll lay it out for you, daddy.

Take Destruction’s thrash metal classic Infernal Overkill. Class is clearly metal. Metal is then sub-divided into three genres: heavy metal (incorporating new wave of British heavy metal onwards), extreme metal and doom/stoner/drone. 70s heavy metal bands, like Sabbath, go in a separate genre in the rock class, while metalcore and sludge go in the punk class. Are you following? I’m taking extreme metal to start with Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All and the convoluted family tree which that album founds, so extreme metal the genre is divided into the sub-genres of thrash metal, death metal and black metal (all real-life genres instantly recognisable by any metal fan). Within thrash, I further divided the bands into the so-called big four (Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax), then the B League thrash bands (Exodus, Testament, Nuclear Assault etc), and finally foreign thrash bands. Now Destruction were part of the Teutonic thrash scene, so the final classification for Infernal Overkill would be:

Metal > Extreme Metal > Thrash > Foreign > Destruction > Infernal Overkill

Here’s Wynton Marsalis’ Black Codes:

Jazz > Be-Bop > Post-Bop > Marsalis > Black Codes

And Biggie Small’s second album:

Hip hop > 90s Gangster > East Coast > Notorious BIG > Life After Death

What a joy. What a fucking joy. And the genres carry a chronological edge to them too: in jazz, say, be-bop follows on from classic jazz, and is then itself followed by fusion, then avant-garde. Within be-bop you can see the progression from be-bop to cool to hard bop and then finally to post-bop. This was it. This was living.

Of course there were problems. There are always problems. The examples I’ve given: metal, jazz and hip hop, anatomise nicely. Other genres weren’t going to play ball. How do you figure out how to convey chronological sweep in punk? 70s UK and New York stuff is fine, but once you’re into the post-punk and hardcore eras you’re struggling. UK and US punk mature at such different points in time that's hard see how to organise it all. Some classes were clearly just miscellaneous (I mentioned folk) and they resented it by resisting classification. I still won in the end. Lo. Like the Holy Spirit bringing form to the void I did settle upon my collection and I did bring order to chaos. And I saw that it was good. Check out these bad boys to see how I whipped my newly renamed ‘roots’ section into shape:

Roots > American Pre-War > Blues > Piedmont Region > Blind Boy Fuller > Get Your Yas Yas Out
Roots > British Folk Rock > Acid Folk > Incredible String Band > Wee Tam and the Big Huge
Roots > American Post-War > Country & Western > Honky-Tonk > Lefty Frizell > Collection

But like God's creation of Earth, this system still left open the possibility of evil. I’m talking about rock here; rock is a shit-eating bastard to categorise. I think I mentioned that a rock-heavy collection will favour a chronological or alphabetical approach. What it won’t favour is genre based. Rock bands stubbornly refuse to fit neatly into categories. Case in point: The Stones. The Rolling Stones started life as a British invasion R&B group, only to mature into a loose rock band. Lots of bands did this too around the seventies. It would be logical to put an album like Exile on Main Street in the company of pals like Toys in the Attic or Funhouse. An obvious name for the genre would be 70s rock, right? But, the problem is that Beggar’s Banquet, the first of the Stones’ loose country rock period, is actually from 1968. Shit. Can’t put it in with Aftermath, because it doesn’t sound similar. Can’t put it in with Exile on Main Street because it’s from the wrong decade. What to do? Create a genre called ‘loose rock and roll’? Ugh. No. Too subjective. This is about genre, not mood. Mood-based is a classifying system for children. And what about those Haight-Ashbury bands like the Grateful Dead that never had a clear changeover period and tumbled gently from 60s pop to 70s drugs music? These are questions that I still can’t answer.

In the end I went for a loosely chronological approach to genres within the general rock class: rock'n'roll, sixties/seventies and then later music, taking new wave to be a changeover point. Within those genres there are rough divisions into sub-genre. For example 60s/70s rock is divided into 60s pop, 70s rock, hard rock/heavy metal (e.g. Led Zeppelin), country/southern rock, prog/krautrock etc. It works okay for the early period, but for later stuff it just falls apart. Past new wave, the divisions are just 80s arena rock, alt/indie (including really divergent stuff like post-rock, nu-metal, anti-folk and madchester stuff) and then contemporary.

Contemporary’s the real problem, the gaping wound. It should be a triumph, but instead it’s the writing on the wall. The writing says that instead of going out and experiencing fun new music, I’ve let my taste ossify while wasting my life playing with dead genres and trying to build the ultimate acid folk or LA hardcore punk collections. I’ve barely got any contemporary rock music in my collection. Now it’s all caught up with me and I’m left sadly trying to find a musical link between Animal Collective and MGMT, wondering how it all went wrong.

I tried going to friends with these problems. For some reason they were all fascinated. I expected them to edge nervously for the door when I brought it up, but they were all amused. I guess there’s something compelling about watching even a train crash. They probably see me as some sort of Sid Vicious character – no point stopping crazy Joe they say to themselves. That probably means that they’re bad friends. Good friends would have staged an intervention by now.

So, classifying the rock section continues to raise more questions than it solves. I still don’t have the answer to any of it. If you read this and have any ideas let me know. They’d be appreciated. I’m still happy with it though. Life’s all about compromises. Obviously, no collection is perfect where Gram Parsons gets to live in the constant eye-level party that is the rock section, while Prince has to toil in the shin-level electro-pop gulags of soul/funk, but hey, life goes on.

The excel sheet was a few months ago. I’ve now put theory into practice. My collection sits proudly on six mighty Ikea shelves, occupying an entire wall of my house. I feel I’ve grown as a person. Browsing CDs is a new-found pleasure. So is cutting up the card dividers – it’s a happy ending.