The body that decides which shelf a record belongs on has been in emergency session since Thursday over Cassandra Wilson's catalogue. It has been failing to file her since 1993. Sources say the Monkees cover keeps setting everyone back.
"...and we have tried jazz, we have tried folk, we have tried country, and every time somebody reaches for the divider card the room goes quiet," a senior classifier told SnarkWire late Thursday, sounding like a person who had not seen daylight in some time. "Nobody wants to be the one who puts Cassandra Wilson in a box. Nobody has ever wanted to be that person. That is the whole problem."
Sources close to the situation confirm that the International Genre Classification Bureau, the little-known body that decides which shelf a record lives on, has now convened its nineteenth emergency session on the singer's catalogue. The first was in 1993. The latest began within hours of the news that Wilson had died aged 70.
Insiders describe a room littered with divider cards, cold coffee and at least nineteen abandoned flowcharts. One chart reportedly begins with the word JAZZ in block capitals and then simply trails off into a question mark the size of a dinner plate.
A crisis 33 years in the making
The Bureau's troubles began, sources say, with Blue Light 'Til Dawn. That 1993 album placed Robert Johnson and Joni Mitchell songs side by side and delivered them in a contralto so low and unhurried that the jazz desk, the blues desk and the folk desk all filed claims on the same afternoon.
"The blues desk said the Robert Johnson covers were theirs," recalls Perpetua Brandvold, the Bureau's chief filing officer, who has attended all nineteen sessions. "Folk pointed at the Joni Mitchell. Jazz pointed at everything else. We adjourned for three years."
Those three years ended in 1996 with New Moon Daughter, which won a Grammy and, according to internal notes seen by SnarkWire, "made things considerably worse." The record contains a Monkees song, a Hank Williams song, a Neil Young song and "Strange Fruit," and Wilson sang every one of them as though she had written it herself that morning on a porch in Mississippi.
"A Monkees song," Brandvold said, and then said nothing else for some time.
The Time magazine incident
Matters reached a boil in 2001 when Time magazine called Wilson America's best singer. The Bureau, which had by then reduced its ambitions to filing her under "American," discovered that even this was contested by the country desk, which pointed out that "American" was not a genre and had never been one.
"We had a compromise ready," said one classifier who asked not to be named because the room was still in session. "Jazz vocal, with an asterisk. The asterisk was going to be quite long. Then somebody played the Hank Williams cover again and the whole thing collapsed."
"Her voice did not cross genres. It simply declined to acknowledge them, the way a river declines to acknowledge a county line."
That line, from Bureau minutes dated Thursday, is understood to be the closest the body has come to a formal position in over three decades.
Streaming makes it worse
The rise of playlists has only deepened the emergency. Dashiell Okonkwo-Lynch, a senior playlist curator at a major streaming service, told SnarkWire that Wilson's songs currently sit on "Late Night Jazz," "Southern Gothic Americana," "Rainy Day Folk," "Delta Blues Essentials" and, for reasons nobody at the company can explain, "Focus Beats."
"The algorithm gave up around 2014," Okonkwo-Lynch said. "It just files her under Cassandra Wilson now. Which, honestly, is the only correct answer, and we are not allowed to say that in a meeting."
Sources say the Bureau has considered creating a standalone category bearing her name. The proposal failed on a technicality: a genre, by the Bureau's own rules, must contain at least two artists, and after a long search the room could not agree on a second one.
Jackson watches and waits
Back in Wilson's hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, the news of a nineteenth session was met with something between a shrug and a laugh. A local record shop owner, speaking in general terms, said the store had solved the issue years ago by putting her records at the front by the door, under no heading at all, where people trip over them and take one home.
The Bureau, for its part, has not set an end date. Brandvold told reporters through a closed door that the body would "keep going until we get it right, or until somebody plays the Monkees cover again, whichever comes first."
As of press time, sources close to the situation report the room has gone quiet once more. Somebody, apparently, has reached for a divider card.
Wilson, meanwhile, remains exactly where she always was: on every shelf at once, and on none of them, singing low and slow and entirely on her own time.
