Extract
Carousel Corner: Thinking Inside the Box.
With the ascendancy of the compact disc, the recording industry's ability to gather large amounts of material into a single product has likewise risen. Box sets, once the province of specialty publishers such as the Smithsonian Institution, are ubiquitous nowadays. They can focus on a genre (The Smithsonian's Anthology of American Folk Music or The Ska Box), an era (Nuggets), a style (Rock Instrumental Classics), or an individual artist. Depending on the commitment of the producer and the availability of high-quality master recordings, a box set can be alternately a hoot, a transcendent experience, or it can manufacture the kind of vagrant hash that makes a cauldron of paella seem organized by comparison. In fact, the current agglomeration of box sets is the only justification I know for one of those bilious CD jukeboxes. Nah.
Beg, Scream & Shout! The Big Ol' Box of '60s Soul (Rhino). This scrumptious collection of R&B essentials -- yeah, the title sez Soul, but "soul" wouldn't come to describe the genre until very late in the decade -- is musically brilliant, but we're going to start with its box, a tour de force of marketing nostalgia and genius. The box replicates one of those cheesy cardboard totes your big sister used to cart her 45s around in, complete with chrome-plated hasp and plastic handle. Each of the six CDs is nested in a plastic replica of a 45 r.p.m. single, which in turn resides in a record sleeve. Each the sleeves and the 45 "labels" -- the imprint on the CD -- is a gentle satire, the Rhino logo is morphed to resemble some classic soul logos from the '60s: Atlantic, Chess, Stax, Motown, a...See the full content of this document
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