Creek Running North

I spent a little time recently ripping CDs from my collection to put on the iPod, and came up against the limitations of the CD Database (CDDB), that online resource that keeps you from having to manually enter all the track names from your Celine Spears Diddy records. Since I don’t generally listen to the two hundred officially sanctioned albums of the moment, I find myself typing track names into iTunes fairly often. (What, Tuna Universitaria San Crist�bal de Huamanga’s three-volume set of Peruvian vernacular music isn’t mainstream enough for you, you stupid database?)

But typing is fine. What bugs me is some of the stuff I listen to that is in the CDDB. At last count, CDDB included three and a half million CDs, with genres and subgenres as varied as bebop, ska, gothpunk, baroque and classical and devotional and altcountry, and you may have noticed that all of these genres are played by bands in the US and UK.

But stick a Simon Shaheen CD in your computer, and CDDB’s database comes up and labels it “World.” I just last week got a package from Peru containing Centro Artistico Cultural De Puno’s CD “ Rosendo Huirse Con Las Hermanas Echarri”; CDDB genreizes that as “World” as well. Same with King Sunny Ade and Dangdut and Indonesian guitar music. Tuvan throat singing? ‘World.” I’m a bit surprised to see that Uzbeki chanteuse Mokhira’s album Galing Galing bears the genre “unclassifiable,” as she fuses middle Eastern and East Asian and hip-hop themes well enough that she deserves the genre “World” if anyone does. I wonder if they listened to it before classifying it.

How hard is it to at least put the name of the country or region of origin into the Genre field? I’m not asking the bright folks at Gracenote to understand the difference between huayno and marinera, or juju, highlife and palm wine music, though if they can grok the boundaries between Cajun and Creole in Louisiana they’re certainly capable of it.

I’d just like to see a little less blithe blindness to the fact that US culture — and its wholly owned subsidiary, British culture — is not the bright spot at the center of the universe. There is not a single US popular musician currently recording who can unambiguously best Regis Gizavo, and Regis Gizavo isn’t even the best musician from Madagascar. And yet he’s lumped into a trashbin taxonomic category meaning, essentially, “Wog,” while a host of largely indistinguishable dilettantes from North America each get their own category based on whether they wear plaid flannel or black NuBuck Vinyl when they whine. During the height (so to speak) of the 1990s alt rock era, Gina Arnold, the local free weekly’s music columnist, spent column after column on the latest band from a five square block area in Seattle, and proudly claimed that she had no idea, nor did she care, where Madagascar was. She and George “We Don’t Need Old Europe” Bush might be at opposite ends of the spectrum… but they’re on the same spectrum.

Anyway.

Eliza from Raised By Cats sent me a very thoughtful email the other day to let me know about The Smithsonian’s Global Sound music site. If you’re anything like me, hide your credit card before clicking that link. The entire Smithsonian Folkways catalog, it seems, is downloadable there, as well as stuff from subsidiary labels such as the late, lamented Paleo-Bolshevist Paredon records, run for a time by Barbara Dane before she sold the catalog to the SI. If you were looking for your chance to score a new copy of The Force of Life by Berkeley’s own The Red Star Singers, now’s your chance. I listened to some of the samples from that album, and was magically transported back to a fabled time, the mid-1970s, and a late night listening to side one of that album over and over again as we cranked out the Buffalo Community Calendar on a creaky offset press owned by Marxist Leninists, who argued with us about including a Margaret Mead talk because anthropology was subjectivist rather than objectivist, and the turntable was set to “play over and over again” because we all had wet ink on our hands. Good times.

Anyway.

Advantages of the Smithsonian site over the iTunes store:
- The Smithsonian site has music I actually want to listen to.
- They sell it to you in mp3 format rather than Apple’s copy-protected “buy a copy for each machine you want to play it on because we sold out to the RIAA” AAC format: you can archive the Smithsonain stuff on CD-Roms if you want to.

Disadvantages:
- They really need a “download entire shopping cart now” button. I spent a half hour clicking links to download one song at a time.

And the Smithsonian doesn’t fill in the Genre ID3 tag at all. Is that a feature or a bug? I don’t know.

Afterthought: Credit where due, of course. I tossed the Cui Jean CD (which my lovely sister-in-law bought me in Beijing 10 years ago) into the box, and CDDB correctly identified the CD’s title as “?????”.