Modern or Classic?

With the State Fair’s feeble lineup sounding the traditional power chord that marks the close of the summer concert season,Twin Citizens can crawl back under the rock of pre-recorded music for the cold winter months. Even in Minnesota, the Internet has not killed the used record store, nor the people who insist on taking their custom there.

“I’m well into my thirties,” said Brigid Phister, who lives just a few blocks from the Uptown Cheapo Records outlet, where she pops in about twice a week. “But I keep up.” She was dressed in a dark blue T-shirt, black jeans, black Doc Martens. She revealed a couple of modest tattoos and one visible piercing (nose). She did not look outrageous. But she was outraged. Well, a little. “This is just ridiculous,” she said in disgust, shaking her head and holding up a copy of the Talking Heads’ album Remain in Light. It’s ridiculous because Cheapo’s staff stocked the album—a pivotal work in the history of modern rock and a crucial text of the alternative canon—in its new “classic rock” section. It might have gone in the new “modern rock” section, but there it was, rubbing elbows with redoubtable seventies groups like Foghat and Triumph.

Cheapo staffers recently remodeled their store, and when they did, they had to figure out a way to make their massive rock section more accessible. “The problem is, when you use just the alphabet, it’s a long walk,” said store owner Al Brown. “I don’t want people to be intimidated by the hugeness of the store.” His idea was to create several little stores within one giant one. In all, there are nine sections under the new scheme.

But now, Cheapo has a problem. It’s a problem faced by grocers and librarians, Web developers, and radio programmers. That problem is: What goes where? And once it goes where it goes, what do you call it? Unlike groceries, though, music carries with it all kinds of extra emotional baggage. People identify with their music in a way they don’t identify with their mayonnaise. It’s part of what defines them. When you tamper with their music, you are spoiling for a fight.

There are those who would rather stay out of record stores altogether than be caught browsing through a “classic rock” section. There are just so many connotations they don’t want to be associated with: Do-rags. Mullets. Drum solos. Muscle cars. Bic lighters waving in the stadium darkness. George Thorogood. Even people who like “classic rock” tend to shrink from the label. Blame radio programmers, who gave us that label, but destroyed the music’s reputation by playing the same songs—both good and abominable—relentlessly for the past thirty years. So now, “Radar Love” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” are roughly the equivalent of “Happy Birthday” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Taken together, these criminal acts by corporate radio have led to Brigid Phister’s reluctance to shop in the classic rock section at Cheapo, even though that’s where she must now go if she wants Talking Heads.

To be fair, it’s not always easy to decide what is “classic rock” and what is “modern rock.” Where should Dave Matthews go? Pearl Jam?

Brown walked through the aisles with me recently, just as the exhausted staff was finishing up the restocking. The original idea, he said, was to split rock history in two using Nirvana as the breaking point. Every act whose debut album was issued before 1991 (the year Nevermind came out) would go into classic rock, everything that came after would go into modern. This presented problems right away, of course. For one thing, where does grunge itself go? Based largely on classic rock with some punk elements, you might think it should go into classic rock. On the other hand, grunge represented a tipping point in music history, marginalizing eighties hair metal and opening the way for nineties alternative and neo-punk. So bands like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots went into modern rock.

But there were other, thornier problems. The whole idea behind the Talking Heads, Television, the Clash, and other such bands was to critique “classic rock,” to rail against its excesses, even to destroy it. Nonetheless, those bands were pre-grunge, so into classic rock they went.But then things began to change. CDs started getting moved. REM, another seminal modern-rock band who started in the early eighties, went from classic to modern. So did Celtic punks the Pogues, who probably deserve their own bin labeled “super-alcoholic Irish folk.”

One reason for the moves was confusion and disagreement among the staff. Many insisted on sticking to aesthetic principle. Others just wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible, and the grunge-based split seemed easiest. But there was another, more prosaic reason: “The classic rock section ended up being a little short,” said Brown, looking slightly sheepish. So, to balance things out, the grunge split was abandoned, and ad hoc decisions were made. Dead Can Dance and Del Amitri went into modern rock, but Talking Heads stayed in classic.

But if the original reason for this whole thing was to save customers’ shoe leather, it seems that arbitrarily sorting the merchandise would be counterproductive. If you don’t know who is stocked where, you spend a lot of time going back and forth between the sections. I did just that in looking for a Patti Smith CD—walking the entire lengths of both sections before I found it (it was in modern rock, despite having been recorded when Kurt Cobain was still in diapers).

“It can be a challenge to the customer,” admitted a store manager named Neill Olson. “We keep moving stuff back and forth.” He and the staff have been the objects of “good-natured ribbing” regarding the new layout, but they haven’t heard much in the way of caustic criticism from customers. Most of that has come from the staff itself. “At first we thought the whole thing was crazy,” he said. And while he’s grown “more comfortable” with it, some of his employees are less so.

“It’s been really frustrating,” said Sarah Johnson, an exasperated clerk. “It’s all based on opinion,” she said, indicating that this was a bad thing. “The Talking Heads,” she said, citing the band that seems to keep exemplifying the conundrum, “define modern rock to me.” She feels for the more confused customers. “I’m confused by it, and I work here.”

Olson has an answer for the hypothetical complaining customer. “Hey, buddy,” he said, eyeing me closely, and maybe sneering just a little. “There are other things to worry about besides what goes into classic rock and what goes into modern rock, you know?”—Dan Mitchell


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