The genre labelling thread
 

There's a lot of threads made to find the genre of a specific artist, as there is pigeonholers everywhere (yes, I'm one of them). These threads seem to piss off the more experienced members, and I couldn't find a thread for generic genre-labelling. So guess what? I made one. Now I just cross my fingers and hope that someone doesn't close this thread.

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.

This is exactly what I started doing in foobar2000. For a lot of artists I could never really throw them under one single genre, so instead I just apply multiple genre tags to albums. For example something like Slowdive - Souvlaki might have 'Shoegaze; Dream Pop; Indie; Alternative' tagged as genre so then foobar can display the album under each of those genres. Unfortunatly it doesn't group it that way on my iPod. I would ignore labelling with genres altogether but it's just nice to sort your music collection under some sort of grouping to make it easier to find stuff.

Genres are helpful to give someone a casual idea of a sound, but they don't work like taxonomy. They're not static, they're constantly changing, they overlap, their qualities are ambiguous and debatable, and ultimately when it comes down to it you will not be able to pin anything down to just one descriptor for its sound.

What's your goal with your thread? Perhaps some discussion can come of it, depending on what you hope to learn.

I just want a thread where people can ask "what genre is this" without starting a whole new thread. I couldn't find a thread for this using the search button, so I made one.

What genre is this?

Post Modern Neo Classical Grind Con Thrash Pile Pigfuck

your ears will bleed Unicorn tears

seriously get on it now before it sells out