play that funky music, white box

I’m spackling the holes in my iTunes library this week, organizing my virtual CDs onto virtual shelves. The last, and most difficult, stage is assigning genres.

My first problem was whether genres denoted the characteristics of the music itself (jazz, blues, funk), or the setting in which it will be played (dance, easy listening, holiday). I decided the genre is best used to describe the music, leaving the functional grouping to playlists.

But I quickly discovered that music genres do not lend themselves to iTunes’ flat categorization. There are hierarchies and overlapping sets of music; only playlists can tame the wonderful variety of popular music. As I work up (down?) the hierarchy, I’ve begun thinking about the most basic categories of music.

(I’ll say up front: I’ve never read a book or taken a class in music appreciation. I’d be interested to know what those with greater levels of music appreciation have to say about this.)

I know what the terms Modern, Pre-Modern, and Post-Modern mean in reference to fine art, architecture, literature, but how do we assign the terms in the field of music? I know what Classical, and maybe even Baroque, music is. I know these periods far post-dated the respective periods in fine art and architecture.

So what is modern music? One popular label for the Modern Era in America is the Jazz Age. But is jazz itself actually modern music? Compare someone like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and it’s obvious the latter pair are the modernists. Are early and swing-era jazz pre-modern? Surely, Doris Day and Frank Sinatra — who outlasted the big jazz bands that gave them their start, but generally stuck to Tin Pan Alley standards — did not make modern music. On the other end of the shelf, Hip-Hop, beginning in the Seventies, and sampling everything from Classical to Funk, definitely falls in the Post-Modern category.

What happened to modern music? Parker’s jazz seems to qualify. Or does its deconstructionist tendencies make it Post-Modern? Perhaps my confusion is due to academic music being for so long so out-of-touch with popular music, that popular music never was constrained by labels as much as the other popular arts. Could it be that the reason why fine art, architecture, and literature are so easy to categorize in movements and eras is because they are historically academic?

Popular music is so wonderfully fluid. It seems to require a neural net of influences on each riff, harmony, and melody. And to try to separate popular music from the movies (Singin’ in the Rain), music videos (All The Things She Said), and commercials (I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing) to which they are tied would be futile. My dream would be a comprehensive pop culture web, along the lines of IMDb, but with strength-of-correlation represented for each link, and with the actual media accessible.

But, for now, my precious One-Hit Wonders are being swamped by shuffles with the overwhelming tide of lounge singers, Beastie Boys, big bands, and KROQ* albums that comprise the bulk of my iTunes library. Only careful categorization via playlists will save them.

* KROQ is Los Angeles' alternative music radio station, largely responsible for the curious identification of Asian-Americans with the British Dark Wave in the 80's.