Genre madness

Louis Armstrong once said, “There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad.” Clearly, he never had to ID3 tag MP3’s. I don’t care much for music classifications, but the OCD part of me can’t bear to leave the “Genre” field blank when ID3 tagging MP3’s. I wish I could be like Louie and simply put “Good” or “Bad.” But, no, I have to make an attempt at classification without driving myself crazy.

Which, of course, I do. Take, for example, metal. When I began to rebuild my music collection after losing it last year, I was determined to tag it properly this time around. So at first I tagged everything with the lowest level of specificity: Metal, Rock, Jazz, and so on. Then I realized that with hundreds upon thousands of metal albums on the way, calling them all Metal would be meaningless.

So I got more specific: Death Metal, Black Metal, Doom Metal, and so on. But that started creating problems. I couldn’t bring myself to call bands like Soilwork or In Flames “Death Metal.” There’s nothing death-y about them. So I had to create a new classification to set them apart: Melodic Death Metal. Same thing with Doom Metal. I ended up creating Sludge and Stoner categories because I just couldn’t call, say, Eyehategod “Doom” or Kyuss “Sludge.”

But I think I’m drawing the line there. Once I start calling Thergothon “Funeral Doom” or Confessor “Technical Doom,” I fear I’ll disappear down some rabbit hole of eternal celibacy. Still, problems arise. Are The Gates of Slumber “Metal” (I haven’t created a “Heavy” subdivision yet) or “Doom”? (For sanity’s sake, I refuse to assign bands multiple genres.) “Thrash” and “Black Metal” have no subdivisions for me yet. But what would I call, say, Metallica’s Load and Reload? S&M;? St. Anger? These aren’t thrash records, but they’re by a thrash band. Maybe a “Bad” category is in order after all.

I’m curious how you deal with these issues in iTunes or your media player of choice. What degree of granularity do you reach in classification, and what considerations drive it?