It's funny, the genre conversation has been going on for ages. I remember one of the formative producers of house music, maybe Derrick May, but I can't recall, saying that he didn't understand why the British needed needed so many labels for house music. Part of me understands why artists don't like being categorised, I imagine it feels like boundaries placed on their creativity or just labels that they feel are a bad fit, either way an externally applied limiting factor.
For myself though I look back at the origins of dance music genres and it feels like it makes sense and especially now with such a huge catalogue of music out there and so much being produced every day. I've always tended to look a labels as general navigation whether it's my race, my gender, my nationality or my musical choice, I feel like a label even a comprehensive set of labels could never sum me up as a person, in the same way it could never sum up the joy, depth or complexity of the music I enjoy.
So if a label isn't a definition, what is it? I see labels as general navigation, a way of filtering the vast amount of information to something manageable. So if I'm looking for something like "Pressurized" by Lampe in a music platform like ZipDJ or Beatport, putting Music in as a search term it's not going to be very helpful. Putting in Lampe will get me there but for that I'd have to already know the producer.
I had this exact issue the other day. I was invited to play techno at a Psy-Trance event, but wanting to work with the vibe I thought to myself "Well, I want something that is techno with some psy-trance vibes. I wonder if PsyTech exists?" and sure enough I land on a rich vein or producers that generate exactly what I want, suddenly I have this fantastic hit list of producers and music that it turns out I love. I'm not sure how I could have done that or virtually any of my music finding expeditions without it.
It harks back to the days of record stores and the origins of a lot of the genres, house music was originally just a subset of disco music that was played at the Warehouse nightclub in Chicago and marked by the record stores in a section called house music. So, even our house music producer forebears were doing the same in the end.
That said I imagine you are a piece of music, and lovely in your own right, that sits outside the well searched labels you wouldn't be happy being filtered out all the time. So maybe they aren't good for everything.
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