More than once I’ve heard someone question aloud why this band or that band is this or that section in the store, and sometimes I even agree with them and move things around. Overall though, genre is a very subjective thing. Every record store owner in the country is faced with the organizing challenge, and it’s something I love to tinker with— when I have time that is.
Every record store I’ve ever walked into does it a slightly different way, and I’ve examined stores coast to coast. To me, getting away from putting every piece of music made with a guitar in it since the 1950s in a massive rock section is entirely the wrong way to go. Not only does it take hours to get from one end to the other, it lumps together Neil Young, the Cocteau Twins, Sublime, and the Melvins – all wildly different.
At one time Wax Trax’s rock section snaked through half the store. I was pulling my hair out trying to keep that snake in an order that made sense to follow, and that was what finally convinced me to start thinking more about genre. I also found that after I broke rock into oldies/surf, psych/garage, punk/new wave, classic rock, goth/darkwave, industrial/noise, prog/krautrock, and alt/indie–I liked all the debates that it brought up on the staff. It keeps people thinking. And the fine tuning made our organization better.
I’ll be the first to say our system is imperfect, and someday we will improve upon it. At the same time, I highly doubt there is a perfect system out there–anyone who claims one has probably got a problem admitting their mortality. The artists, their own labels, their distros, and every shop in the nation organizes their stock in a different way. I’ve even seen a section called “Modern Muzak,” and once you’ve browsed it, you knew what they meant. Even Wax Trax will never have a perfect system. It just isn’t possible.
However, I can explain the logic behind what we’re doing now. I can tell you my biggest problems with it. And I’m also curious to hear how you think it can be improved–or your gripes about your favorite band’s placement. I can’t guarantee I’ll agree, but maybe.
The bulk of Wax Trax’s genre system is based on the character of the music regardless of when it was played–with a few exceptions. Folk/indie folk, for instance, combines Simon and Garfunkel for the boomers, Bon Iver for the Millenials, and Phoebe Bridgers for the Gen Z kids. The idea is, you get to see the whole history of the genre. Goth/darkwave combines OG goth rockers Bauhaus, and modern darkwave like The Soft Moon.
The wide sprawling world of rock and all its children is where this might get tricky, and where I think we still need some work. Generally speaking, rock is split up the same way but rock gets its subsections by the time periods each musical style was originally born in (also including all the later revivals). Oldies & surf has the originals, the Elvis, the Chuck Berry, the Dick Dale with his surf guitar. But also Man or Astroman with their surf-derivative style ends up there. Psych and garage both broke out in the 60s, but we also include all the revivals that happened later on, like The Strokes and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Prog and krautrock includes OGs like Can and Rush as well as newer bands like Mars Volta and Trees Speak. Classic rock covers the 70s and 80s for the most part, though Punk and New Wave covers the rebels of that era. Alt/Indie is 90s and beyond.
One regret I’ve had is that we didn’t keep true to the idea of including revivals with their earliest innovators when it came to the punk/new wave section. Mainly this was just me not wanting to put pop punk in with the OG 1970s punk – but that was a dumb horse to ride on maybe. Now it means that modern hardcore and post punk is separated from 80s hardcore and 70s/80s post punk. This is one area we’re gonna work on some day (not next week, because it’s a massive undertaking to comb through alt/indie) but it’s on the to-do list. The thing to know is Wax Trax has tons of hardcore and metalcore too. It’s just split up between punk/new wave, alt/indie, and sometimes metal.
Many of the sections are pretty standard to all stores, like jazz, blues, R&B & soul (which includes funk and disco by the way), and country. Also reggae and carribean, though be aware that sometimes a band from another island besides Jamaica can slip in there. And ska has its own section due to its multiple revivals in different parks of the world.
Pop & indie pop does put a wrinkle on things though, because to be here, you don’t have to actually be pop-ular. In addition to the obvious pop players, there’s now a big contingent of what they’re calling indie pop artists, and this is also where we put a good deal of the stuff people call “genre-defying” because often these artists are trying to cross genres and pull a big crowd together. For those that abhor pop, keep in mind that indie pop includes some pretty interesting and unusual acts.
The international section is an exception to the rule about having things under their genre. In this section we put all the bands and artists from a given part of the world, despite their genre. Molchat Doma is in Eastern European, not goth and darkwave, which would make just as much sense. The reasoning here is that it’s nice to see the full breadth of musical styles from a place all together.
The future fix I’d like to see in International is to start separating more countries from the generalized areas of the world. It’s fair to say that some countries have taken more music into the global scene than others, and for those it definitely makes sense to give them their due and a row at Wax Trax. We have Brazilian, but we probably need to break out Japanese from Asian, and also Mexican from Latin American
Another area I envision more work on is electronic. It makes sense to start trying to break things out into smaller categories, since you really can go deep in this genre and find artists that only a few know about, but they put out great stuff. If it isn’t broken out it tends to get passed over because their names aren’t exactly well known. As it is, we have early experimenters like Mort Garson alongside artists like Illenium and Odesza. Metal is similar in that people really do tend to favor one metal subgenre over another, and it’d be great to get every one of our staff members tuned into the differences between death, doom, and stoner.
So there it is, our imperfect system. Complain you might, but something must be right because we’re selling more records than anyone else in the Rocky Mountain region. Someday we’ll be tinkering with it, and now’s your chance to influence how we will do in the comments. How do you organize your collection? What do you want to see all together in one section? What do you have trouble finding at Wax Trax? Most likely it’s here, somewhere, and we can tell you where.
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