Seeking distractions from packing up my things and getting out of this apartment by tonight, I decided to troll around on Last.fm and yell about things being tagged wrong.
On the page for The Human Abstract, I found this.
Well, I clicked. Turns out they’re a very, very small band out of Chicago. Only 97 listeners! (Well, 98 now, technically.)
Unfortunately the music is utterly aseptic Gothenberg-inspired American metalcore. I guess the “kick-ass” part is their aspiration toward “prog” tags because sometimes they let the bass player riff for several seconds.
Ah, well. I’m talking about them, aren’t I? Well played, Inocula. Well played, indeed.
Prog? That’s when you, like, play fast, right?
You know, I’ve considered making an entire post on how much of sucker I am for anything tagged “progressive,” but it hasn’t seen the light of day.
For the record, the “technical” tag means fast playing. In theory, “progressive” means mixing in some other genre. In practice, it means acoustic interludes. Think Opeth or Agalloch, I guess.
Technical is another term that’s very overused.
A few years ago I entirely stopped paying attention to genre or style labels. My own music collection doesn’t have any genre metadata at all. Useless freaking feature, if you ask me.
Really? I have a massive draft about the tagging of classical music, discussing many issues I still haven’t resolved. Thus I haven’t finalized the post yet, but I guess I should dig it out and table it for discussion.
I think tags are an amazing thing and should be present everywhere. Why don’t any major filesystems support tagging? The most popular ones don’t even support enough characters in the filenames that the user can dump metadata there. Why do I have to tag photos inside a particular application? If I want a picture of a tree in a cemetery, in which the tree was very backlit, I should be able to find that from my file manager. And don’t tell me I should name my files accordingly, because if it’s art I should be allowed to give it a creative name.
I see huge stylistic similarities between certain artists and I think this should be accounted for in any organizational scheme. I’m not talking about sorting them just physically proximal to one another, for instance in the filesystem or in some library viewer, but semantically proximal. Genre tags do that for me.
I use it to explore other areas of music. It might be overly narrow-minded to lump a band like Neuraxis in with Necrophagist, but so is it to say that Monet was an Impressionist. Shouldn’t any organizational scheme involving painting somehow afford association between Monet and, say, Cezanne?
Tagging allows this. It’s useful because we don’t have the technology to differentiate between the objective qualities of a piece (such as tempo, distortion level, geographic region of origin, etc.) and correlate them. Pandora is making huge strides in this area, but even if such a scheme is widely adopted by consumers, generation of nomenclature to refer to groupings of many different qualities will still be necessary. We’ll still be talking in tags and genres.
What you’re referring to–free tagging–is an entirely different beast than a single “Genre” slot in codec X’s metadata spec.