Hey, everybody. I hope you had a wonderful and safe New Years Eve and welcome to 2011. Tonight at 10 pm Eastern, I'm doing the first show on PartyFM that has a live DJ. I have nothing special planned and I'm doing an all darkwave show.
Darkwave is a style of music that branched off from New Wave back in the late 70's, adding dark, introspective lyrics and more of a melancholy style. Given that description, it's not surprising that darkwave and the Goth subculture are linked together. Some of the original artists in darkwave were Siouxie and the Banshees, The Cure, Joy Division and The Smiths, among others. If that sounds like your kind of thing, please feel free to listen in at listen.partyfmradio.net and join me in the PartyFM chatroom at chat.partyfmradio.net. My DJ name is DJ_Drak. Look for me and say hi! I'm friendly! Really!
Anyway.
Where it gets interesting, though, it when it comes down to what genre does music or a particular song fit in to? Try categorizing, definitively, the band Red Hot Chili Peppers. Are they rock? Rap-ish? Funk? Alternative? As a side note, I would like to say that I hate the genre "Alternative." What is it alternative to? The mainstream? Well, what's mainstream? There isn't really a "mainstream" style of music anymore, so anything that's labeled as "alternative" doesn't mean what alternative meant a decade ago, when grunge and things like Britpop came about.
Off topic again.
You can't really put RHCP into one particular genre. That's what I find with a lot of songs, too. Especially if I use the Auto-Tag feature in Winamp. (Yes, I use Winamp to broadcast for the station.) The genre that they would fit in is up to the listener, which makes it a subjective thing to try to put stuff in one genre or the other. For example (and this is a bad/funny example), one of the other DJs on the station has a show called the Metal Massacre. He's all about the metal. Fine. Except that he plays Nickleback and the Insane Clown Posse. Now, I have nothing against either of those bands (except that I think Nickleback is highly overrated), but they aren't metal! His argument is that Nickleback is signed to a metal label, so therefore they're metal. That label is Roadrunner Records, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. Cuz when you think Warner Brothers, you think heavy metal music. Okay, fine. I've heard a couple of songs by them that someone could potentially call metal. Great.
Insane Clown Posse? Hardly. I have nothing against ICP and I actually enjoy some of their music. Their remakes of "Posse on Broadway" by Sir Mix-A-Lot and "Let's Go All the Way" by Sly Fox are great. One of the other DJs at the station is a huge ICP fan, so listening to her show, I've gotten to hear quite a bit of them and there is NOTHING in the ICP discography that I've heard that I can even remotely say is metal. Nothing. I haven't heard his argument for playing ICP on a metal show, but hey. It's his show and he can play what he wants. I know I do.
Off track again. Sorry.
When I organize my music (a pretty much constant process), I try to keep things simple. I have everything listed by artist, title, album, track length, and genre. The artist and title are important because of rules we have to follow at the station. The album is kind of important, but mostly for helping me find a song. Track length is important because I have a designated timeslot and when I put my show together, I need to be able to see how much space I have left in a playlist, not to mention moving songs around during the actual show to fit times for me to break in and talk. Genre is important for me because when I do theme shows like tonight, I like to have all of one genre in one place in my library.
Take rap for example. When it comes to rap music, I have several genres that I'm trying to convert to one: Hip Hop/Rap. I use that because hip hop and rap are so intertwined that it's difficult to classify them separately, at least for me. But in the meantime, I have Hip Hop/Rap, Hip-Hop/Rap (cuz the hyphen makes a difference *shrug*), Hip Hop, Rap, Rap & Hip Hop, Rap/R&B, Alternative Rap-Rock (Gah, that one's horrible), Aussie Hip Hop (I made up that genre to help me find specific artists), Christian Rap, Conscious Hip-Hop/Rap, East Coast Rap, Gangsta Rap, General Hip-Hop/Rap, Midwestern Rap (that would be Eminem), Old School Hip-Hop/Rap, Rap Metal (Linkin Park), Southern Rap, and Underground Hip-Hop/Rap.
That's a lot of rap. Rock is the same way. And when does something become "classic rock?" That's another genre that bothers me.
Anyway, I guess the point here is that classifying something by genre is the opinion of the music owner. I try to call all of the music that falls under the category of Rock and Roll as Rock. It makes things easier. Granted, I also have the genre Symphonic Metal. Go figure.
Thanks for reading. Until next time, take care.
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