Tiny Music... Songs from the Last Record Store, Pt. III
Everything in Its Right Place
If you ever wonder what a record-store clerk does with his down time, the answer is simple: He files. And as I stare at a bunch of new CDs that I need to scan and place into the racks, I realize that this is pretty much what I’m going to be doing for the entirety of my time here.
Lauren is tasked with showing me how the filing system works. (You ever been trained by a 16 year-old?) She’s putting these clear plastic rectangular anti-theft frames onto each CD.
“So, these are the plastic things we put on the CDs that are to keep people from stealing them. You just…take a CD…” Lauren has a way of sounding exactly as bored as she looks.
“But the thing at the front of the store that beeps if they go through hasn’t even been plugged in since we moved here. They have to, like, put in another outlet or something. But…anyway…”
The process of filing is pretty simple. Once you attach the plastic frame, you place the CD in the right section behind the appropriate alphabetical card. It’s kind of a drag when you first start, but soon a calm washes over you, like the feeling you get when you’re washing dishes, folding laundry, or doing just about any other wonderfully repetitive task.
As I organize the stacks, I start to realize that I have no clue how to tell rock from punk from metal. I’m familiar with the staples, like, say, Black Flag (punk) and Iron Maiden and Judas Priest (both metal), but a lot has changed on the landscape. Lauren is patient with all my questions, but only to a degree.
“Right, so a guy in a cowboy hat looking pensive and standing in an amber field of grain should signal you to file under country. Got it?”
To spare her further grief, I concoct some rules like if the word hate is in the band name, it’s metal, not punk.
I take the Hate Eternal, Hate Plow, Hatebreed, and Hatesphere and set them aside. All hate, all metal, period. I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking: Yes, but how can you tell punk from metal when it comes to the Atomic Bitchwax, Dead Child, Cock and Ball Torture, Blood Tsunami-—how can you be sure of where to file these nuanced trios and quartets? Excellent question. That’s where the second part of my simple system comes in: If they don’t have hate in the band name, the art will show you the way. So when any of the following elements are on the cover, it’s metal:
Well-muscled corpse men with insect-like mandibles, often wearing a gas mask or a scuba breathing apparatus.
Red swamps, especially red swamps filled with armored skeletons.
Hot zombie women performing fellatio on corpses that are half man and half goat or ox.
Muscular Grim Reaper/hooded ecutioner appearing to hump a big pile of skulls under a sky that’s on fire.
Huge robotic/skeletal spider with bloody fangs standing next to a pretty woman in a dress whose abdomen has a large wound exposing intestines and other vital organs.
There is one tricky exception, and that’s the band Naked Raygun. On the Naked Raygun cover, you’ve got your basic apocalyptic swamp diver wearing a futuristic mask/breathing apparatus in a lagoon of sewage, and they are filed under punk.
Thank God that there is also filing to be done in rock and pop. The metal section is kind of making me a little bit hopeless or lonely or something, as if everybody is a mall shooter waiting to happen. But maybe that’s the point?