I’ve been revising bios for the upcoming season, and I find myself doing a curious thing: pigeonholing my artists through quirky labels. Last summer, I was content to write “American bass-baritone Eric Owens” or “Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn”, but this year, I find myself pushing the epithet envelope: “Genre-bending bass-baritone”, “Demographic-defying violinist”.
Now, those barely make sense, but here I am, racking my brain to come up with something catchy. Confusing, and catchy. The more confusing the catchier? I’m using labels to describe how un-labelable my clients are. In a post-genre – that’s another good one, stolen from an article I read about Obama being “post-racial”…? – musical world, are we able to resist the urge to label?
I went home last weekend and gave my dad, who does not work in The Industry, my client Gabriel Kahane’s new album. He listened to it in his car while running errands, and when he got back, I asked, “What did you think?” “What do you call it?” he question-answered. Would he like it better or worse if I called it one thing over another? If I had said, “I don’t know – it’s music” rather than what I actually said, “We’re calling it ‘post-tonal chamber music meets indie-pop'”? “Oh. So pop music for smart people?” Well…not really…which started a lengthy exchange about what I should label the album, not about the actual music. (My father ended the discussion by announcing that it would be called “Nouveau indie”, for those of you playing at home.)
MySpace Music gives artists a wide-range of genre label choices, but you have to choose at least one. So, on quite possibly the largest platform for exposing people to new music in the world, there is not an option to present yourself without label, and yet, artistically, so many artists profess to be genre-less. How do artists deal with that? Some joke (Gabriel’s genre is Indie/Classical/Regional Mexican), some are painfully literal (the band Lucky Soul‘s profile says Pop/Soul/Pop); I personally like Sigur Rós‘, which is Visual. While this is accurate if you know Sigur Rós’ music, “Visual” is an absurd descriptor; it says nothing about the actual music, only something about the band’s brand and perceived fanbase.
Genre labels are no longer about what an artist’s music sounds like. Rather, labels have become code for how an artist is positioned in the industry, and are used as vehicles for profile-building. The signifier and the signified are not the same, as it were. A single album is called “indie” when pitched to a record store (that will not accept classical albums) and “classical” when placed on iTunes (because there is less competition for features and rankings). When you submit an album to the site TuneCore for digital distribution, you are asked to choose one or two genre labels directly under the name of the artist and album. The choices are: Alternative, Blues, Children’s Music, Comedy, Dance, Electronic, Folk, French Pop, German Folk, German Pop, Hip Hop / Rap, Holiday, Inspirational, Jazz, Latin, New Age, Opera, Pop, R&B/Soul, Reggae, Rock, Soundtrack, Vocal, World, Americana, Country, Spoken Word. Gabriel’s manager reports that a few years ago, TuneCore had a Classical option, since he labeled the last EP “Alternative” and “Classical”, but that seems to have disappeared. Of course.
But even if an album is (somewhat accurately?) labeled “Alternative” and “Classical”, my mind goes to Alanis Morissette ca. 1995 and then J.S. Bach ca. 1747, not Gabriel Kahane ca. 2008. Consequently, genre labels are used to determine where the album is sold, who it is reviewed by, and not much else.
So am I going to take the epithets out of my artists’ bios? Nope, because who’s going to interview a plain old bass-baritone.
And round and round we go.