Blackmoor Vituperative

I am in the process of re-digitizing all of my music. I sold my Neo35, which was a large, hard drive-based MPs player mounted in my trunk, and I replaced it with a Creative Zen Touch, which does everything the Neo35 did, fits in my pocket, and has a much better user interface. So as part of that I am going through and re-ripping all of my CDs to MP3.

One of the many cool things the Zen can do is sort music by genre. So as I’m ripping the CDs, I am assigning genres to them. There’s the rub. Music comes in such a bewildering array of styles, I may wind up with nearly as many genres as I have CDs, which kind of defeats the point of sorting by genre. So I went back and started assigning just a few genres, but then 90% of my CDs were in either “Rock” or “Alternative”. And what does “Alternative” mean, anyway? As I’m assigning the genres, I am thinking, “wait: everybody calls Poe ‘alternative’, but is she really all that different from Rush, which is filed under ‘Rock’?” But if I assign 90% of my collection to “Rock”, why even bother assigning genres at all?

And take Shakira, for example. (I really dig Shakira.) I would probably put her in the same category as Alanis Morissette (“Rock”? “Altenative”?), or maybe Kylie Minogue (“Pop”? “Dance”?), but she always gets put into the “Latin” genre, whatever that is. She should be in a separate category just because she’s from Columbia? I just don’t get that.

I’m just kind of baffled on this whole genre thing.