Music and tags

"People used to make records, as in a record of an event, the event of people making music in a room. Now everything is cross-marketing, it's about sunglasses and shoes, and guns and drugs you choose...". That's in a song from Ani Difranco called Fuel.

Such words are painfully true and bound to set any struggling musician on a rant about how in the good old days things were different and people had much better musical taste and the industry many less suits and ties and corporate plans etc... The musician in question might or might not have been alive in those golden times... It doesn't matter. I display such behavior on occasion and it feels righteous as hell! But that is too broad a topic to try to tackle in a tiny post. I'm gonna narrow it down to one aspect of the marketing side of the music business: labels.

You need to know what you're doing, man! And you need to be able to tell people what you're doing! You can't be too general about it: pop, rock, folk, reggae etc. will not do, you have to add some adjectives in there, lest your music fly right over the top of the potential listener's head and get lost in oblivion. Hence we have quite amazing sounding genre labels this day and age, college rock, prog rock, garage rock, geek rock... electro pop, country pop, emo pop (anything with pop, really)...pop punk, post punk, crust punk, gypsy punk...new grass, dark folk, indie folk ( I was described that once... I still don't know how to feel about it) , noise, harsh noise (my personal favourite) and then you can put "fusion" after pretty much every genre and get a slightly different new one.

I'm not being sarcastic, the labels kinda make sense for the most part. Some are actually brilliant and very fitting, and their usefulness is out of the question too, especially in these times of constant information overload and the overwhelming freedom to choose what you want. Being specific is good. I know that, I know all that! I just suck at it. Every time someone asks me what Sour Bounty is all about, I start mumbling "acoustic" and "singer-songwriter" and going "it's kinda like... you know...? 'Cause there's a banjo...", and feeling totally unfit for survival and 0 like a rock-star. It really is not easy, and if there are any of you out there with a good ear and willing to help, we would love to be classified properly. Please.

(I didn't make anything up today, I swear, you can browse through the Wikipedia List of rock genres and see for yourself. It's a crazy musical world out there).