I'm one of those guys who don't like genre labelling very much, but it's because it's often done in the sloppiest ways. People so often act as if genres are exclusive; f.ex that a song, album or artist can not belong to f.ex fusion and hard rock at the same time. Many also seem to think that genres can't describe the same music; f.ex that alternative rock and indie rock could have some overlapping area and that a lot of music will fall into this area where it could be labelled as either one or both.
These notions are completely false, I think, and building on them means building on a lie.
And then of course there's the problem that different genres are based on different theoretical foundations and basically vague ideas. Indie could describe something about the label of the band whereas jazz describes the properties of the band's music. Those two definitions are based on entirely different things. Most genres, for example prog rock, are so vague in their definitions that deconstructing the term "prog rock" and finding out just what it takes to make a song "prog rock" is work for a long and detailed study. Likely, there is no set definition and each of us work our own poorly founded idea of what that genre should sound like.
So genre labelling at its worst becomes people adding vaguely defined labels by vaguely defined guidelines. If you're gonna do it, I think the best way to do it would be to allow the labelling of several genres to each song, album or artist.
|