What's my genre?

Music genre is always a fuzzy concept - especially when you have artists cross over from one genre to another.  Many times, an artist's first genre follows them along into new musical territory.  For instance, today, I'm listening to some fantastic acoustic guitar that to my ear sounds Latin or Spanish.  The music is  Rodrigo y Gabriela which  (according to Wikipedia) is a musical duo that got their start playing thrash metal in Mexico city - but moved onto acoustic guitars.  Because of their mixed musical roots, they are not easy to classify - and it seems that everyone sticks them into a different genre:

  • eMusic ( where I purchased the tracks) calls them Latin
  • Wikipedia  labels them acoustic,  folk rock and metal
  • All Music  and Napster label them world
  • iTunes labels them reggae (what's with that?)
  • last.fm users label them with tags like 'acoustic', 'flamenco' and 'guitar'

Genre is tough ... yet it is still mostly useful ...

 And here's a YouTube video of Rodrigo y Gabriela


Posted on: Apr 02, 2007

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

Sugoi! (As the Japanese would say) I think I'd break my fingers just trying to understand how they do that. Did you come across them while listening to all the stairways to heaven? Regarding genres: metal seems about right... but I can clearly hear the reggae influences.

Posted by elias on April 07, 2007 at 07:54 AM EDT #

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