Ever since I started digitizing my music library, I’ve struggled with the pronunciation of the word “genre.” I started out saying John Ree, perhaps imagining him as a pioneer in the field of music classification; sort of a spiritual ancestor to the Music Genome Project. Later, I adopted the slurred buzzing intonation that inhabits a kind of Transylvania between the letters “G” and “J”—while retaining a very down-to-earth terminal “ree.” As it turns out, there are two options for correctly pronouncing the word—neither of which I had inferred.
Even more frustrating than the pronunciation of genre is its application to a large music library. Of course, nobody can quite agree on what to call a particular style, whether or not to include a group in that definition, and how that definition should ultimately be formatted. As a result, I have been left with 195 genres, most of which are horrendous chimeras of entities once resembling words. The ten (ten!) variations on “alternative” are, by themselves, enough to cause me physical pain.
Over time, I have organized my music by artist and album—more recently going through and ensuring that albums have artwork (if at all possible) and have been played at least once. The last column in iTunes to be tamed is genre; even the thought of beginning such lugubrious work causes me to feel chilled. Indeed, does one consistently put an artist into a genre, or does their evolution require a new evaluation with each album? How about that one song on an album that doesn’t fit? Does that get its own label or must it be squished in amongst its appropriately-labeled brethren? Would anything be lost if I replaced all genre classification with “music?”
3 responses to “The Genre Debacle”
Just went through my own library, and I discovered I have a paltry 48 different genres. A lot of those are one-of-a-kinds though, of things I’ve gotten for free from iTunes or Amazon or elsewhere (I didn’t know I had a ‘French Pop’ song or that that was even a genre). So looking at genres with at least ten songs I have a mere 17 genres, and that includes Books and Podcasts. I think that’s probably even too many for me.
I think you can either get really nit-picky about it or really broad. I mean, if I’m in the mood for some rock, that might mean light or heavy, but I don’t need to know if it’s Southern-Rock or Blues-Rock or Rock-Metal or whatever. I just want something I can relax to or something that I know will keep me up as I’m driving around at 5AM trying to not get lost on my way to the airport (true story).
So do I plan to reorganize my library? No, most of my stuff is in a ‘close-enough’ genre that I can find with a quick search, and those 31 genres that had less than 10 songs aren’t things I listen to that often, so to hell with them.
That’s my $0.02.
Never checked how many “genres” I have.
(But then, I tend to apply my own idiosyncratic judgment-calls in this regard.
About the “art-work” thing:
Usually (in the interests of maximizing drive space) I purge the artwork fairly rigorously. If I *need* liner notes or suchlike, I type ’em in by hand, and save ’em to a text file. (Yeah, I’m weird.)
Dunno about anybody else, but I personally don’t get the same “experience” from album artwork in Jpegs. Then again, I never gave that much of a crap about artwork even with vinyl albums and suchlike, either.
I guess I obsess over maintaining artwork in the hopes that one day, I’ll have an iPhone or similar device that uses artwork to browse. A lot of album artwork is bland, but every so often you come across a real winner.