The best of the worst, the worst of the best.

A grading that cancels itself

The Bureau owns a rubber stamp marked QUALITY and a second marked NO QUALITY, and for thirty years it has applied them, one to a record, with confidence. Then a V/Vm release arrived, and both stamps came down on the same sleeve, and the ink has not dried since.

The phrase is Leyland Kirby's, and it is the only quality classification the Bureau has been unable to resolve: the best of the worst, the worst of the best. It was offered as a description of a method and the Bureau received it as a filing crisis, which is the Bureau's failing and not Kirby's.

Consider the apparatus. V/Vm takes the most reviled material the pop century produced, Chris de Burgh, the sentimental ballad, the wedding-disco floor-filler, the song you would not admit to owning, and degrades it, mangles it, slows it to a smear, so that the worst record in the shop becomes, by the operation, a thing worth keeping. That is the best of the worst. Simultaneously it takes the most revered material, the canon, the critically-armoured masterpiece, the record you are obliged to respect, and treats it with exactly the same contempt, so that the best record in the shop is revealed to survive no better than the worst once the dignity is stripped off. That is the worst of the best. The two operations are the same operation. This is the part the Bureau cannot file.

The natural Bureau response to an ungradable object is to declare it a hoax and move on, and the Bureau tried that. But the work is sincere in the only way that matters: Kirby means the joke completely, has built the sleeve and the catalogue number and the rack-placement to carry it, and has never once winked. A prank pursued to that depth stops being a prank and becomes a position. The Bureau knows of only one other operation conducted with the same total commitment to an absurd premise, and it is the Bureau.

There is a deeper unease, which is that the phrase is not really about records at all. It is a description of taste itself, of the thin and arbitrary membrane between the thing you are allowed to love and the thing you must be ashamed of, and V/Vm's whole catalogue is a finger pushed slowly through that membrane until it tears. An archive is a machine built entirely out of that membrane. The Bureau spends its days deciding what is canonical and what is excluded, what is industrial and what is merely near it, and a man in Stockport with a slowed-down Chris de Burgh record has demonstrated, without raising his voice, that the membrane was never load-bearing.

The Bureau has therefore filed V/Vm twice in the public register, once as an artist and once as a label, and has declined, in both, to say whether the catalogue is good. This page is the reason for the omission. The grade is the best of the worst and the worst of the best, the stamp says both, the ink will not dry, and the only honest entry the Bureau can make is to record that it tried, and that the rubber stamps have been retired to a drawer, and that the drawer is this page.

It is the best file in this dossier. It is also the worst. These are, on inspection, the same file.

Filed twice, graded never · VAGO · c. the interwar period · both stamps applied; neither withdrawn