Music Genres - are they useful?

Teddy boy Rockabilly

I disagree! Blues is a musical style , nothing to de with skin colour, regardless of where/how it originated (though I don’t think of the three you mentioned as blues artists).

Blues was a term given to a type of music before any “Style” as such.
By the time as such became a “style” it stopped being the blues and more an interpretation of it.
Whether you still think that’s the “Blues” is probably more appropriate to this thread.

When, and by whom, and for what type of music?
I think that most people have a fair idea of what is blues - and would not limit it to Muddy Waters or Jesse Fuller or Mississippi Fred McDowell or whoever.

“Peter Green’s work with Fleetwood Mac is one of the (very few) genuine artistic peaks of whiteboy blues, not only demonstrating a fluent mastery of the music’s stylistic devices, but a startling penetration of its emotional core. Performances like ‘Love That Burns’ aren’t simply white blues, but ‘blues’ blues of a high order; that weary, wracked voice and piercingly sweet guitar tone would honour any bluesman of any race, place or time.” Charles Shaar Murray- Blues On CD.

1 Like

I really like early Fleetwood Mac - Peter Green was excellent.

1 Like

Indeed, and I would add Bluesbreakers era Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and perhaps one or two others, Roy Buchanan or Duane Allman perhaps. In any event most ‘genres’ are essentially marketing tools.

@TOBYJUG. Okay then so where would you file Eric’s collaborations with Robert Cray or B B King?

Not with my music tastes. I’m Mr Fusion.

Artist/group/composer a-z has worked for me since 1971 from LPs to filing and tagging FLAC files on my NAS.

“File under Ron Geesin” still makes me smile

2 Likes

New to all this and currently ripping to an Innuos Zenith. Tagging is hilarious and often so far off I can only presume it’s a joke. I’ve quickly realised that at some point I will prune the tags my CDs are being given but my more immediate priority will be to ascribe the correct years which I find far more useful. The amount of music I have from 1990 is astonishing when in reality it was no more than the year mass re-releases took place and CD really began to take over. Fairly confident my 7 Paul Robeson CDs did not get recorded in 1990.

My favourite so far was the meta data telling me that the 4th of my 5 Fall Rough Trade Singies box was actually a promo EP by Magnum and was choral.

Mike make me laugh. I can remember when I first ripped some classical CDs to my iPOD iTunes managed to enlist Mozart as the performer!

Regards,

Lindsay

Early recording?

1 Like

Frankly I think we should have genre free music, it should just be music. Decades later they can choose they’re own genre if they feel inclined to.

1 Like

Genres are arbitrary definitions usually arrived at by somebody who isn’t us. They can reveal as much as they conceal, in my view.

The context of genre categorisation - in terms of time period, comparison to other examples of that type of music, the person making the judgement - makes the whole thing a faintly ridiculous attempt to standardise something that is better filtered through a subjective lens.

That said, I still often use the terms myself, but try to indicate something about the chosen style and choice of instrumentation, presentation, production et al, in the hope that might convey a smidgeon more meaning beyond a potentially narrow use of the term “hip hop” or “jazz”.

1 Like

This is my approach too. With a lot of music it is impossible to put it in a pidgeon hole. Different so called genres gain influence from each other!

Maybe Frank Zappa was right.

He said there are only 2 types of music, good and bad.

2 Likes

Looking at Genres in my n-Serve app, I have a surprisingly large amount that came tagged as “New-Age” whatever that is.

I have absolutely zero use for genres when trying to catalogue or find my music. Only vaguely useful when discussing music with friends…

Genre is the thing I use most to find my music. I often think I’d like some chamber music, a bit of jazz or whatever. My music is divided into 16 genres and I find it incredibly useful. The whole blues / folk / country overlap is a challenge but it’s possible to put albums into more than one category so that’s fine. Pop- Rock is a catch all for everything that isn’t something else. It’s proudly figureheaded by Dame Shirley Bassey for some reason.

1 Like

That leads onto a potentially equally interesting discussion around whether anyone has a bare bones list of genres they would be willing to share.

Classical
Pop
Reggae
Blues

And so on.