Blessed are the Tastemakers

I went shopping for indie rock CDs in Canada, and figured out what's wrong with higher education in America.

Specifically, I was in a CD store on Rue St. Denis in Montreal, where my lovely wife and I were on vacation over the holiday weekend. Since the Canadian good bands per capita ratio is, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, at least 50 times greater than the American ratio, I had high hopes upon entry. But it soon became clear that I was out of my league. I'm one of those people who's heard of all the good Canadian bands that everyone's heard of (the New Pornographers alone have made three of my 25 favorite albums of the decade) but none of the bands that nobody's heard of. This store seemed exclusively dedicated to the latter. There was an obligatory copy of Neon Bible for sale, but that was hardly the point.

After getting over being confronted with the limits of my coolness, I noticed some interesting things about the store itself. Even though it wasn't very big, they were only using about 20% of the available floorspace. Most of the CDs were on single row of tables in the middle. They could have easily fit 10 times as many CDs into the store if they had wanted to, but they obviously didn't, because this store wasn't selling access to music. They were selling taste.

Our younger readers may not believe this, but there was a time not so long ago when you could know that a CD (or LP) existed, want to buy it, have the money to buy, but be unable to buy it, simply because you couldn't find anyone to sell it to you. There was no Amazon or eBay or iTunes; if they didn't have it at the local Strawberrys or Tape World, you were out of luck. That's why a visit to someplace like Tower Records in New York City was always so great--it was a whole building full of music, where you'd spend hours flipping through the racks looking for the early Smiths album you were missing or--even better--the fabled "European import" of some Neil Young concert from the early 70s.

The point being, Tower records was selling access to stored information, in this case sonic information. Then the Internet came along and opened up that access to everyone, everywhere. Not surprisingly, Tower went bankrupt. But the store on Rue St. Denis is still open, because the challenge of the information age isn't in gaining access to information, it's making sense of it. It's not figuring out how to buy CDs, it's figuring out which CDs to buy--and which not to. Those are issue of judgement and taste, which only people can provide. The value of the Montreal CD store was as much in the albums that weren't on sale as in those that were. In that context, only using 20% of your floor space makes a lot of sense.

The store also had a single wall rack that took this principle to even further extremes. While the rack was built to hold CDs about 10 deep, only the first three rows were in use. They were devoted exclusively to the gods and giants--Hendrix, Bowie, Neil Young, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen (this being Canada), the New York Dolls, etc. (Although this last selection strikes me as somewhat false; I think it was Chuck Klosterman who noted that while everyone can recite the one-paragraph version of the Dolls' seminal place in the late '70s NYC punk scene and thus life as we know it, no one other than self-serious rock critics ever listens to their music, owns their albums, or even knows what they sound like. The image and idea of the Dolls were infinitely more important than any music they actually made).

Moreover, the CD store wasn't just selling the standard "essentials" catalogue for each artist. Instead, there was a carefully selected combination of iconic works, under-appreciated studio albums (i.e. Axis: Bold as Love), obscure concerts, BBC session outtakes, etc. It was pretty cool.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with higher education?

Beyond the obvious point that Hendrix appreciation is a higher education in and of itself, this CD store embodied the promise--and in many cases, the failure--of the undergraduate curriculum at the contemporary American university.

In some ways, universities went through all this a long time ago. While recorded music wasn't widely available until the mid-20th century, recorded words have been in circulation since Guttenberg. But even until recently, universities were judged by their prowess in storing and providing access to information, embodied in statistics like the number of books and journal subscriptions held by the library. They're still judged by the percentage of professors with PhDs--information stored in human form.

But these assets are--and really, always were--essentially irrelevant to the needs of your average undergraduate. Those students don't need access--they need taste. In other words, they need the university to apprehend the vast array of human knowledge and make some very smart, considered judgments about where to start and where to focus in building an education. They need the equivalent of the CD rack of gods and giants for the realm of ideas instead of music.

Unfortunately, most big universities moved away from this kind of core curriculum a long time ago. Instead they set students loose in the equivalent of Tower Records, with instructions that amount to "Buy at least one CD from Rock/Pop, Jazz, Classical, Soul / R&B, Folk, and Country. Then pick one of those categories and buy 10 more CDs from that section, plus another 10 from that section or any others."

In fact, it's worse than that, because universities are more limited than Tower in terms of what they can offer, and their offerings tend to skew toward what the faculty want to teach, not what students need to learn. It's like the above scenario, except there are only 50 CDs in each section, selected by a socially maladjusted record store clerk who looks down on the clerks in charge of the other sections (who feel the same way about him) and who has decided that the 50 albums in Rock/Pop will include the complete Yngvie Malmsteen catalogue, but not Exile on Main Street.

This doesn't mean every student needs exactly the same core curriculum, like some kind of rote march from Revolver to Never Mind the Bollocks to Nevermind. But it does mean that universities need to do a better job of applying some degree of judgment in working with their students to decide what they need to learn. Otherwise, they may end up like Tower Records, while the little CD store up the street thrives in selling the intellectual taste that, more than anything, students really need.