I've got to disagree with that last statement.....
Music is catagorised into genres because each genre
sounds different, are
composed in their own ways and not to mention the fact that genres help to make it easier for people to sift through the many thousand songs released a year....
People are labelled unconciously in our own minds
anyway, music itself isn't the cause of that- the cause of
that problem is us being
human and conversely judging people by design and first impression rather than some random perception of what's beneath the appearance. We're not mindreaders- we as animals need
some form of identification for strange people, that's what it's in our nature to do, it's our
instinct when it comes to strangers. Unfortunately for idealists and to be honest people in general, that's the way we are.....no matter how many times (and I've tried.) we try to run away from it. The only thing we can do as individuals on the subject of labelling is to do our best to remain objective by being mindful of our tendency to label people, at least, that's how I try to beat it anyway.
I'll be honest here and say I think it's incredibly idealistic just to off hand say that labelling is stupid, because it's what we do, we're human- we're collectively very stupid, very animalistic (Dispite people trying their best to disprove it.) and very averse to judging things based on their differences.....that's what we do. Without labels, there's collective chaos within any movement.....for example; could you imagine films being released without a label, and simply as a title? It'd be ridiculously confusing.....
That's not me saying that it is necessarily a
right or
ethical thing to do, especially on the subject of
appearance labelling, but appearance isn't the issue; without genres, music would be a much less humanly interesting a subject, as it'd be much harder to sift through, harder and more confusing to talk about and most importantly, it'd be nearly impossible to specialise as an fan or as an artist in a way you feel comfortable. Genres provide rules and constraints for a musician and a band to try and fit, mould and hopefully enhance, shape and evolve.
If Blues for example hadn't have came along, Classic Rock may not have evolved or maybe even existed, as they were natural forms of evolution to offshoot creatively from.....same being for Blues leading to Metal as well.....Blues is the backbone for any serious metal band's basis.....
Genres are a necessary and important form of catagorisation most especially in my opinion for those of us like myself who pour much of themselves into their chosen forms of music, we see these things as being far more important than merely a 'casual' hobby.....as a musician of any class, good or bad, genres add structure and variety as well as influences to draw on.
I can understand people not wanting to be 'tied down' by genres, partly because I notice more and more people growing up in this age are trying their best to be as standoffish, as inoffensive and as crowd-pleasing as possible, and that's fine- we've all done it at some point; I myself was guilty of doing it when I was a teenager not so long ago, I can also put it down to people not being as interested in music as myself and others, I can also put it down to casual fans springing up (Which to be fair is a majority of people.) and just sort-of 'listening to whatever' which is very common.....Whatever the reason, I cannot agree with this fundamentally because music makes up too much of my life and my time for it to be in chaos, for it to be unstructured to find, for it to lack the ability to spawn the awesome community that I'm a part of, and most importantly for it to be unable to inspire me as a musician in a set field because of it then being a confused, gibbering mess of an artform, instead of what it is now.
That's not me saying that all music is great, genres also allow for commercial crap to be created and fed to people who sit and watch Big Brother and read The Sun and think American Idol and the X-Factor generates talent.....but that's not really the point I'm on.
Anyhoo, wow, it's been a long time from I launched into a rant like that; sorry if anyone got swallowed up in this, no offense is intended- just a mass rant from a tired dude thinking too much.
I'll stop melting everyone with my random tangent while it lasts! I'm off to bed.
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