thinking in genres

...is it bad for you? ;P I know a site like prog archives helps us to compartmentalize music in a semi-standardized way, but my mind has a much neater system which is reflected in the way I tag my mp3s' genre fields.

(these are the six terms I use: ":F", "sexy", "silly", "smart", "tears" and "xi". nothing falls outside of these.)

don't you find that thinking in terms of genres tricks you into stereotyping? As much was pointed out to me in my "not liking rock" thread, although mostly by people who can't read or visit a last.fm profile. o:) I say that having your own system lets you think critically about what people write about music.

I personally have 2 genres: Porcupine Tree and Not-Porcupine Tree. it makes things very easy to categorize.

Quite obviously, the use of genres is a stereotyping classfication method since it uses certain genre stereotypes for determining the genres to be used for the classification of the various bands.  This stereotyping can have both positive and negative connotations.  As a general rule, I am not interested in the RIO/Avant or the extreme/technical metal categories, so when a band is labeled as such then I benefit from my stereotyping of these genres by not subjecting myself to music that generally I do not like.  On the other hand, I will unfortunately miss out on bands that are categorized as such that I might actually have liked if they had not been labeled as such.  Of course, as we all know, when it comes to many prog bands they are all over the map when it comes to where they actually fall in the world of prog as their genres change from album to album and from song to song, and even within songs. 

I prefer not to think of the resulting stylistic characteristics of the music when it is completed but instead consider the creative process, as a result genres are negated.

In my own head my categorizing is a bit odd in that it is not really based on the rock, rap, jazz, etc genre mold.  When I am deciding on what album I am in the mood to listen to I think in the categories of "groove", "heavy" (could be heavy in the traditional sense or other contexts), "dynamic/moving", "moody", and something along the lines of "f**king fantastic". 

However thats just in my head for choosing.  When operating in conversation or organizing my collection I have my basics Rock, Jazz, R&B/Soul, "Classical", Folk/Non-Western, Country...

These sections are broken down into their smaller sub-sections if needed.  When organizing I will break rock into the categories of Prog, Alt, Metal, Punk, but if I am in a conversation and its getting pretty in depth I will begin to use the even smaller genre names for the sake of better description so that Metal isn't confined to a confusion of Cannibal Corpse being the same as Death because they are both within Metal.

I'm not into that dumb genre creation sh*t like Skruzz or whatever the hell other stupid terms like that were created. 

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Toaster Mantis wrote: I think of genres as descriptive terms rather than categories. That's exactly how I see it. Unfortunately some genre labels are simply not descriptive at all: Zeuhl, Canterbury, Raga-Rock ... as a newbie you don't have a chance of figuring out what they mean without listening to the actual music or reading genre definitions. In the end these non-descriptive genre labels are monikers for lists of simpler, descriptive attributes. For example, "Post-Rock" can be seen as "Experimental Minimalistic Rock" at least for some of the bands. For GY!BE you could add "Atmospheric" and "Noisy", for Sigur Rós you could add "Melodic". Zeuhl can be seen as "Avant-Garde Dark Weird Minimalistic Prog Rock". Some may see this as even more pidgeon holing, as the genre labels grow longer. But actually the definitions get broader and more intuitive.

I use genres as a way of categorizing my music in my collection and to help me have certain coherence in the order I put my cds. I never ever use "tags" as I think they're utterly useless. They're just descriptions with no practical value whatsoever. genres may not have a definitive value also, but at least they help in practical aspects as, I said, arranging a cd collection. In a website, they're useful because for the newbie, for the new listener (like I was at some point) it's so much easier to discover new bands by following a genre clasification than by following tags like "sexy" or "dark".

There are two genres in Prog Music and music general

stonebeard wrote: I personally have 2 genres: Porcupine Tree and Not-Porcupine Tree. it makes things very easy to categorize.

lol

In some way, categorizing music into certain genres is necessary to define their music...that is, if you're unable to define it w/o the use of genres.