(It’s improved our listening habits, for sure, despite my grumbling reluctance.) I similarly struggle when people ask what kind of music PoB traffics, because I’d prefer to describe it in terms of the affective, make-believe genres that Chris and I laugh about during late-night sessions (boot cut, quittin’ time, shrimp plate, sneaky jamz) than the equally ridiculous, contingent, and ambiguous genres (folk, country, rock and roll) you see attached to record store bins or on Spotify playlists. (“World music” and “folk music” are perhaps the most egregious and noxious examples of the diluted meaninglessness of musical genres, but they all collapse upon close inspection.)įor years, I refused on principle to organize my record collection by genre, preferring an overall alphabetical scheme, but I finally relented when my wife Samantha reasonably pointed out that we could never find what we were looking for, and that as a result, we were only listening to a tiny fraction of the collection, mostly recent acquisitions already in rotation. We live in a fractious, fearful world that requires no further divisions, aesthetic or otherwise. But it’s such a sloppy, politicized business, often more related to the identity of the listener, and the perceived identity of the artist–race, class, geography, faith, etc.–than to actual emic cultural values, auditory information, or slippery musicological signifiers like “style,” that we tend to avoid it when possible, at least amongst ourselves. It fulfills certain pragmatic needs, of course, to discuss expressive culture, and music in particular, by classifying and categorizing it. Lafferty, The Devil Is Dead (1971)Īs a record label comprised of old friends with largely aligned, often weirdly telepathic, curatorial interests–decidedly not the same thing as taste, which is a bourgeois ruse, but don’t get me started on that–Paradise of Bachelors has long nurtured a vexed relationship with genre.

“Learn the true topography: the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness you are inside them, trapped and howling to get out.”

The narrator by michael cisco