Talk:List of music genres and styles/Archive 1

What the hell happened to this page? It was such a cool list of genres, and then somebody flattened it and took out a bunch of genres? WTF?

I have to agree... even with the link to musical genre, it's still just one big alphabetized list. If I were looking for more subgenres of something this is not what I would want to see. I think the list looks better in its pre-TUF-KAT version. -- goatasaur

Me too! :-) The classification and subsections are way cooler. Evercat 02:03 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Well obviously I disagree, but I don't feel too strongly. I thought that was what was decided at Talk:Musical genre but now I see that we didn't quite agree on what I thought we agreed on. My feeling was that the old system was cumbersome to edit and was inherently flawed because binary classification simply doesn't work for music. (Also, I didn't take any out, at least not deliberately) For example:

• A list of essentially unrelated genres were placed under "Latin music". While this isn't inaccurate, it could be considered misleading. Why does Latin music get lumped together?
• The old system required us to place things like emo under punk rock, which is a POV that many would disagree with
• In some cases, classifying one genre beneath another implies an ancestral relationship, while in others it implies stylistic similarities

Tuf-Kat 17:24 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Just in case someone didn't notice, I added lots of genres at the same time, so simply reverting will lose them. Tuf-Kat

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Revising what I said before, you're right, sorry, nothing was taken out, just reorganized. And I haven't been monitoring the talk:musical genre page. Hmm... and I do agree with you that some of the classifications are stupid, like Ambient music can be a subgenre of several genres, including western music (though it began in europe), electronic, rock n roll, or contemporary or new-age or whatever. But it's pretty much agreed-upon that Drum n Bass is a subgenre of Jungle. But then again, Jungle and Dnb can stand parallel as well. Ugh. I guess trying to define this kinda stuff is a bad idea.

I think the question we need to be asking ourselves is: why are people going to be checking this page out, and will they want a tree-type view as we had before, or will they want to be able to find stuff alphabetically?

An idea might be: after each genre name and link, put some related genres next to it. Like:

Downtempo (related to: trip hop, ambient, hip hop, electronica, illbient) and then beside the trip hop section, for example: Trip Hop (related to: downtempo, electronica, hip hop, jazz, dub) know what i mean?

Maybe we should also think about merging the "artists by genre" and "musical genres" pages into one page. So it would be like:

Trip Hop (related to: downtempo, electronica, hip hop, jazz, dub) Artists: Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky...

long rant here, but maybe some of this stuff needs doing.

Pema

Two responses:

• Defining a purpose for the page is useful. If a reader is interested in knowing the relationships between genres, musical genre and more specific pages are the place to put them. List of musical genres, I think, is simply an index page like many list ofs -- more useful for contributors to see what there are articles on and what there isn't any articles for than for readers to actually learn much. A one or two sentence description next to each might be nice, but I don't like the "tree" format.
• Artists by genre lists are index pages too, though they have more of a benefit for readers interested in discovering more artists of a particular genre (as opposed to trying to find out more genres). I don't think they should be combined, because those lists can be longer and more complete. The captions next to each genre here could list one or two artists, maybe, though that could get too controversial -- it would be worth a try, anyway.

Tuf-Kat 02:24 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

While it doesn't bother me too much, I don't like the hidden links at the ambient subgenres to ambient music. I understand why they were created, but if I click on a link to ambient dub, I want an article on that, not on ambient music in general. Tuf-Kat

• The danger of being too specific is that multiple articles on the one subject get written. This is what happened with ambient music. Several people wrote separate articles on ambient music, ambient, and ambient techno - all got merged into ambient music. To stop it happening again I linked all the articles to ambient music. Surely it is better for all the related sub-genres to appear in one article. If someone wants to expand the article they can add extra headings for the different sub-genres. At the rate this page is going, with all the sub-genres being added, there will be a separate sub-genre for every music critic's opinion. Music genres should be broad enough to fit a wide range of artists and songs. For me a musical genre tells me if I will like a song or not, using that logic there probably should be about 5 genres. ---- kiwiinapanic 09:40 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)
  • Music most people like.
  • Music the record companies like.
  • Music the critics like.
  • Music that other people like.
  • Music that nobody likes.

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I've begun adding captions. What do we think? Tuf-Kat

Useful, as long as the summaries are kept very short - it's already a massive list, and if people start adding paragraphs of text, it will get out of hand. I skimmed the top of the list and the ones you've put in look fine. Basswulf 09:11, 1 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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Does anybody have any objections to moving this to List of genres of music. Two reasons:

1. Musical genres just sounds awkward, IMO, though list of genres of music repeats of, and is also kind of awkward
2. The title could be taken as referring to genres of musicals (as in plays with music and singing), while list of genres of music is pretty unambiguous

Tuf-Kat 09:33, Nov 10, 2003 (UTC)

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In my opinion musical genres are "subjective" in the same way that gender is, or the designation of a portion of land as containing a valley and a mountain, which is to say genres are constructed. I think right now the article trivializes genres, saying basically: "Genres are all made up," with no discussion of how genres are used to sell music and how they are uberimportant to many many people. Hyacinth 04:04, 7 May 2004 (UTC)