Categorization: what IS rock?

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I knew I’d have to do this at some point – tackle the sticky issue of music genre classification. If I’m going to track the rise and fall of the various music genres, I’m going to need to work out what is what.

Guitars: guitars are pretty key to rock music – but that means James Blunt and Jack Johnson get in on a technicality. Are they rock? Do I limit it to electric guitars? Is this a bad thing? It all depends how basic I am making my categories.

For example, I am currently looking at the Top 40 albums for each year, between 1999 and 2009. I initially started out with:

• pop
• rock
• dance
• urban
• misc (reserved for Best of the Blitz type albums)

However, I soon decided to merge Dance and Urban – as dance was a very small category in terms of album sales.

This still doesn’t solve the problem of Mr Blunt and co.

An artist such as James Blunt is certainly not dance/urban, yet I am reluctant to place him in rock. However, I eventually put this down to my personal opinions, and decided that, in fact, that is where he, and other acoustic/easy music artists belong.

ADDENDUM

I intend to further investigate the ROCK category, and see which TYPE of rock was prevalent – already it is clear that the James Blunt category of Acoustic/mellow rock (which also contains The Script and Coldplay) is by far the strongest category.

Am I putting too much of my own love of heavier rock into this?

Is James Blunt rock?

2011

03/15

CATEGORY

issues / debates

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