Genrefication: Part 1

'Genres' are the kind of things people in blatantly generic bands and poncy music journalists claim to hate. I can easily picture an interview in the cursed NME, where some nob journalist who thinks he's doing the world a favour through his choice of career is interviewing an utterly shit band, like Razorlight, and says something like 'you've been compared to 'X' in some of the reviews of your latest album, what are your thoughts on that?' and the singer, who takes himself way too seriously, says in a really self righteous manner 'Well, it's good to be compared to 'X', they're a band we really respect, but we don't like to be pigeon-holed, on our next album we're going to be experimenting with some new sounds'. 'Like what?' the journalist says. 'Well, like, on one of the tracks we've dropped in some Gamelan drums... etc.' And you really really want the journalist to say 'Shut up, you nob! You're just another band on the Fordist line of bandwagon-jumping 'garage rock' wannabes who mistake their tribute band level talent for musical genius. You look like 'X' and sound like 'X', the only difference between you and 'X' is that you're about a millionth as original cos they did it years ago. The only reason anyone buys your stupid records at all is because, we put a drug on the pages of NME that can be absorbed through the skin that makes teenagers think whatever we say is the absolute truth'.

I on the other hand, think genres are one of humanity's best inventions. I love them because they represent the epitomy of humanity's desperate struggle to categorise everything regardless of how difficult an undertaking it is, resulting in some truly remarkable genre names, like Symphonic Viking Metal and Intelligent Dance Music (the ones with three or more words are the best). People who are averse to genrefication are standing in the face of millenia of human behaviour at it's most pedantic. Humans love to create systems out of randomness. But all our systems have an in built logic no matter how obscure they appear from the outside (see Mary Douglas's attempt to understand the categorisations in Leviticus if you're a geek or alternatively think about how we categorise fruit and vegetables and still don't quite believe that a tomato is a fruit). The question is; how does the genre system work?

This is an ongoing project of Genre Recognition, so here's my first stab at it and it isn't easy. Over at www.allmusic.com they have a section that lists all the genres they could think of this total comes to over 1000, counting only a few overlaps. Now some of these are hybrid or hyphenated genres like 'electro-acoustic' or 'neo-traditional', but they still count. In fact one of the coolest thing about genres is that they are almost limitlessly composite. But, back to the basics.

Firstly where do genres get their names? This is really complex, as genres seem to get their names from loads of different things. My head really hurt working out this, and there are probably some I've missed out or got a bit wrong.
See part 2 for the results of my labour.