I’ve been thinking a lot about genres in music. Overall, I think they are dumb. That’s just my opinion, and I do understand
that it can be important for a band trying to get into a venue or festival or
to get played on this or that station to have a clearly defined genre label. When I need to use a genre label, I try to
defer to the band’s own description.
Don’t even get me started on sub genres and sub sub genres,
and all the pseudo genres that some clever music journalist invented. I hope that artists will just continue to
make great music and only after the fact and only when necessary worry at all
about picking a genre or genre to categorize their sound. Because that is really all genre labels are really
is a way to put everything in a neat little pile.
It always annoys me when people say I hate _____ (fill in
the blank with a genre label). When I
hear that, I always think to myself, and what do you mean by ______. And usually there is some specific type of
music that they don’t like, and they are arbitrarily eliminating a whole bunch
of really good music from ever entering their consciousness. It doesn’t make
sense to me, but I’m kind of weird like that.
Here at Ear to the Ground, we don’t set any restrictions or
limits on the music we feature, and really we go out of our way to add a
variety of different genres and types of music to our playlists.
Today’s mix begins and ends with the Blues (or at least some
variation of that clear yet still indistinct genre label.)
JUMP TO THE MUSIC
