Kaelri

My music library is one of my prized possessions. (This does not make me unique.) My music software of choice is, and has been for many years, iTunes on Windows. (This does make me unique, or at least part of a badly misunderstood minority.) As such, I spend a lot of time keeping my library organized and trimmed, and today, I’ve been struggling to pin things down by the cruelest, most elusive species of metadata: genre.

I hate genre because there’s no solution to satisfy the purist in me. Clearly I need some method of classification; the latest Radiohead album does not belong in the same category as The Best of Enya. But where are the borders? When does pop become pop-rock become rock? Should I separate punk rock, indie rock, progressive rock? Too many Rocks, you might say – not enough Boulders. And that’s just for the artists whose styles are vaguely pigeonhole-able. Where, really, would you put The Books? No-Man? Andrew Bird? What do you do when Sufjan Stevens releases an EP* that is clearly anything but rock, except for one track which is explicitly called the “classic rock version”? And just when you think you’ve got a peaceful situation, will Bear McCreary decide to cover a Bob Dylan folk ballad with Indian instrumentation for a science fiction television soundtrack? I usually end up with a very big “Alternative” section, which is code for “this stuff does not fit anywhere else even though it makes up a plurality of everything I own.”

None of that is relevant to what I meant to write about here, which is this:

By some weird coincidence, I ended up with exactly 1019 songs in the “Rock” genre, and exactly 1019 songs in the “Soundtrack” genre. But, even stranger, the Soundtrack group adds up to 2 days, 8 hours of music, while the Rock group trounces it with 4 days and half an hour. This is pretty counter-intuitive to me. I tend to think of rock stuff as being fairly self-contained pop-length numbers, and soundtracks as long, formless, sprawling soundscapes. On the other hand, I have a lot of Genesis, Pink Floyd and Porcupine Tree, which may have dramatically skewed the results.

Anyway. I invite you, wherever you are, whether you’re at home or wherever, to inspect your own auditory treasure for fascinating anomalies.

*It’s also an “EP” that’s sixty minutes long. It really is futile to define art sometimes.