Genre Bashing
Work finished for another week; check.
Musical itch waiting to be scratched; check.
Yes, I'm aware the majority of them are created/named to allow us to distinguish between one set of artists and another.
Yes, I know it used to assist those who established the 'charts'.
Yes, it provides store assistants with untold excuses to re-arrange their shelves.
But...
Why?
Why do we feel it necessary to apply labels to music?
Does it satiate some desperate inner need - are we all suffering from undiagnosed mass-OCD?
Is it cultural?
Wouldn't it be easier for the same store assistants to file in one , big A-Z? Isn't that what most of us do... (yes, I know, unfair question; oh go on then, tell me how you do it, but remember, Hornby beat you to publishing his 'categorised by relationship' idea...)
I was in Brussels (the home of bureaucracy) on Monday and popped into an independent record (sorry, CD)store, where the proprietor had done just that - one big filthy mass of music, your original Abba to Zappa. Wonderful.
It just occurred to me that the eclectic nature of music doesn't deserve artificial barriers, especially in the age of the randomizer, and that I'd have an even wider palette to choose from if I hadn't spent the majority of my teenage years eschewing 'other' genre's because they weren't 'cool'. What have I missed?
Probably just me, right?
Itch scratched.
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In my iTunes library,
I currently have 86 separate genres, none of which I have put there myself. And I hate it. Every so often I begin an attempt at rationalising them down to a manageable number, but it never happens.
The Oeufman approach - one genre called 'music' - is absolute genius.
i-Tunes Library
I think you've just hit on another theme Paul - how many times have you downloaded something and it's been awarded a musical category so far removed from the truth it's made you laugh? Apart from the fact I'd rather have no genre's at all, it does make me chuckle (and then wince) when Morrissey is labelled 'chamber-pop'. Let's not even go there with the modern take on r n'b, unless to say that yes, there's a rhythm in there somewhere, and more often than not what it's wedded to makes me blue.