If history has taught me anything it is this – those who can’t keep up with the times are destined to be left in the dust, or at least somewhere behind those who are kicking up said dust. The medium of music storage and technology is no different, as anyone trying to find the latest cut from Kanye West on cassette tape I’m sure will readily relate to you. However, this is an issue that is not relegated simply to the sphere of those “old fogies” still clinging to their James Taylor 8-tracks. Now even young hipsters like myself are faced with a difficult situation that needs to be addressed – that is, that the years I have spent building my beloved music collection may have been in the support of a dying medium. Having personally spent a good deal of time and an even greater deal of money on supporting the compact disc and the companies and artists that produce them, I have remained largely oblivious to the emerging prevalence and convenience of the MP3 as a musical medium. Yet, as I am not one to cling (at least not completely) to a sinking ship, no matter how slow the descent, I have recently sought to regain my status as an individual in-tune with progress and the Zeitgeist of music storage.
To be blunt, I bought an I-Pod. A big one too, with about 30 GBs worth of space to accommodate my varied tastes. This purchase was more than just a singular decision, however, as it set in motion a process that held sway over a good portion of my time for a good while. First, I was led to download the essential I-Tunes program with which to manage and dictate the nature of my new toy’s innards. This in turn led, of course, to the conversion of my music library from the physical world of the CD to the abstract realm of digital music. Afterwards, I was left to copy my library onto the device itself, essentially completing my journey into musical modernization. However, during the importing process a few issues became readily apparent to me, issues that re-sparked the last few embers of some custom concerns of mine relating to music classification and association, issues that I feel to be of interest and importance not only in reflection, but also in how they relate to human perceptions and psychology. I’ll discuss the first issue here, and leave the second for the following posting.
The first and most glaringly obvious of the concerns that raged in the foreground of my mind was the concept of musical genre. Now, for years I have seen and noted the obvious inability of music genre to accurately capture and relate the sound of a band. One band of note and the one that comes first to mind when I reach for a great example of the failings of genre as a descriptive device is the band Tool. When I first discovered Tool it was in the “Metal” section of my local music store, and for the most part this “Metal” descriptor is the one which I have seen the band largely classified under throughout the years, and it is also the genre classification of Tool that I-Tunes itself subscribes to. Yet I seem to remember a time many years ago when, after placing a Tool album into the CD drive of one of my high school’s computers, the music program used to play the disc opted to classify the band as “Alternative Metal.” Moreover, doing a search online concerning the band’s genre or simply asking an individual or two to categorize the band can often yield some unruly and oftentimes confusing results, with many people classifying Tool as “Art Rock,” “Progressive Metal,” or even in some cases “Math Rock.” Cases like this, that involve the creation of sub-genres and the like, leads to a definitive “What the hell?” in my mind concerning the perception of genre as a whole.
While classifying Tool specifically as a “Metal” band is not necessarily the most outrageous of claims, some of the genres I have seen pop up by my favorite bands on the I-Tunes program have proved to be a bit arbitrary as far as I am concerned. For example, what exactly makes Primus any more of a “Metal” band than, say, Nirvana (who are listed as strait “Rock”)? With no outline given as to what qualifies a band or artist to be one genre or the other, I am left to ask myself who it is exactly that is defining these artists as “this, that, or the other.” After all, a forty-nine years old executive’s idea of what is “Metal” may not be the same as his twenty-year-old son’s perception. One even more curious quirk I’ve noticed within the program is a variation of genre within the sphere of a single artist. The band Joy Division is such a case, with the songs from their 1980 release Closer listed as “Alternative and Punk” (more on that in a moment), while the pieces from their singles collection Substance are apparently “Rock” songs. This only testifies all the more strongly to the arbitrary nature of genre assignment.
Speaking of arbitrary, I would like to focus for just a moment on the ever-popular “Alternative” label. The notion of “Alternative” music has grown ever more weightless as the years progress, a fact recognized fairly openly by many music fans. As so-called “Alternative” music has risen to the top of the charts in the last few decades, many are left to wonder what exactly this music is an alternative to at this point, as many bands this label apparently applies to have become mainstream musical juggernauts in their own right (Radiohead and The Smashing Pumpkins are two examples that come immediately to mind). This term has also degenerated to something of a catch-all category, used to classify anything that doesn’t openly fit into any other apparent genre. As such, this particular label stands as the ultimate example of the arbitrary nature of genre, as it does almost absolutely nothing to capture the sound of a particular band (though I suppose it’s ultimately a descriptive label than “Math Rock”). Moreover, when I examine the bands listed as under this descriptor in my library, I find that none of them are actually listed as solely “Alternative” but rather “Alternative and Punk.” This is especially infuriating, as it further blurs the perception of a band’s sound, making artists like Tori Amos just as “Punk” as bands like Blink-182, though “Punk” as a genre classification has become almost as arbitrary a label as “Alternative.”
