Posts filed under 'Music History'
Good Music is Good Music
From time to time, I may have my music player on shuffle while a group of people listen to it. Every so often, a song will come up that will make everybody in the room look at me with a quizzical look. What just happened? All of a sudden a song considered by many as “not cool” or “cheezy” happened to be next in the shuffle. My reaction is always the same: hey “good music is good music”. This is something I have learned to expect when playing my music of every single genre in random fashion for groups of people.
Here is someone else explaining the same situation:
2 comments May 29, 2009
Not one genre for Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.
I was randomly listening to my music collection when the next song in the queue came up to be: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy. I currently have this song under my “Rock” genre. I don’t know what I was thinking when I assigned “Rock” for this song. Anyways, my first reaction was to move it from rock to …. – then, i froze. What genre is this song, really ? It has a dance groove, but the vocals are heavy on R&B, hmm…
After a quick google search, I found an article that decomposes this song and mentions its genre:
“Crazy” is not really gospel, that “Ha ha ha, bless your soul” line notwithstanding. Nor is it disco (despite the undeniable groove), or hip-hop (despite the presence of a rapper and a DJ), or a pure pop song (despite the monumentally catchy chorus). In fact, “Crazy” seems to float outside genre altogether, which helps explain its wide appeal—most every musical constituency feels comfortable claiming it. “Crazy” has landed on the pop, R&B/hip-hop, adult contemporary, and modern-rock charts. No other hit in recent memory has crashed as many radio formats.
heh. I knew I wasn’t alone. There are very few songs that are released nowadays that have a great appeal to audiences from multiple genres. Popular music is more than 50 years old and many music variations have been tried. It takes songs like “Crazy” to prove that there is still room for uniqueness in the music industry. It’s no surprise this song made a huge impact in 2006 (#7 top song of the year).
As to my personal dilemma in assigning a genre to “Crazy”, well I just left it at Rock, for the moment. As I have mentioned before, I don’t place much emphasis/time in genre associations in my digital music collection – I just pick whatever makes sense at that moment.
1 comment August 5, 2008
Electronic Music Genre Tree
Over at techno.org, you can find a well-constructed Electronic music genre tree. The authors claim to “entertain before it informs”, which is how we should really treat any music genre tree. As I have mentioned in the past, music genres are one of the most subjective topics, therefore all music genre trees should be taken with a grain of salt. The tutorial found in this site is a good explanation on electronic music, in general. Have fun there.
2 comments August 3, 2008
