The SpectrumThe First Posting(originally from December 6, 2003)

This was the first posting at Music Spectrum which explains why my music isn’t in alphabetical order and how I think about music. It originally appeared on December 6, 2003.

It all started in 1986 when a friend gave me The Queen is Dead by the Smiths. The music was thrilling to a teenage boy struggling with so many intense emotions. Morrissey’s lyrics seemed to come directly from my own thoughts; Johnny Marr’s guitar combined with those lyrics with the same emotional intensity.

The Queen is Dead deserved the first spot in my box of cassette tapes. This sent other tapes to back, Thriller, the Monkees, and the Footloose soundtrack. With that, the Spectrum was born, a sound spectrum. My cassettes could not be organized alphabetically but rather according to musical styles.

Other British groups like the Cure with similar sensibilities were worthy to be near the Smiths at the beginning of the order. I created new sections in the Spectrum for garage/indie bands like the Replacements and for guitar-laden rock like Midnight Oil.

Cassettes gave way to compact discs, but I kept the Spectrum. I radically changed the order while in college to reflect the historical development of musical genres.

I set the current order for the Spectrum while in California after learning about musical influences from KFOG, a radio station that plays rock, new and classic, and blues. I created labels to describe the distinct sections I had in mind when I looked at my CD collection—a collection which looks like a complete mess to anyone else.

Yet, alphabetical order would never do, because how can the Beatles be right next to Beethoven, or Midnight Oil next to the Glenn Miller Orchestra? Even if you separate the classical and jazz selections, you still end up with odd juxtapositions like Nirvana next to the Christian band, the Newsboys, or Bob Dylan sidling up to Duran Duran. Such an order makes it extremely difficult to pick music based on my mood. So I follow the Spectrum.

The Spectrum is not absolute, and I constantly debate with myself about the location of certain artists and even entire sections. So I hope to use this blog to discuss the question of how music fits together. Can you line up your music collection on the shelf but still somehow represent the development of musical genres?

How does music fit together with our lives? Just as The Queen is Dead changed my appreciation of music, what others artists and albums are influential? This is a place to discuss what music means to us.

As a Christian, I am constantly trying to see how my faith in God can answer the angst, rebellion, and sadness in so much of the music I find compelling, including the Smiths.

The Spectrum helps me organize my music collection, but really it is a way of seeing how one album is a part of the entire musical history that influences an artist. The Spectrum represents the range of thoughts, emotions, and personal life history attached to the music I love.

To see the order of categories in the Spectrum, please go to the Spectrum Order & Index.