Meaningless Genre Labels?

Temple Stark thinks musical genre labels make no sense.

People get quite, quite stupid about trying to define genres of music. Certainly there are time references and bracketing of music, but gritty, heavy, middle of the road, prog-rock, emo, alternative (the ultimate useless label)?

Ah yes, "Alternative". Alternative has now completely lost it's original meaning, because it's represents a style that's now become the mainstream, while the music it was originally supposed to be an alternative to is now called "classic rock". The British "Indie" is equally stupid when it's used to refer to present-day corporate rock acts like Coldplay and Franz Ferdinand.

I'd admit there is a difference between "heavy metal" and "hard rock", but I can't think of any specific genre markers that separate one from the other. It's just something you know when you hear it. Black Sabbath are heavy metal. Thin Lizzy are hard rock. And I'm not even going to try and explain why. What ends up endless causing arguments between musical anoraks is that most genre boundaries are fuzzy, and many truly great bands are too varied to sit neatly into any single genre, let alone a sub-genre. When you get into 'Progressive Doom" or "Zinc Alloy Metal" (OK, so I made that last one up!), I'm lost. I think most bands that fit too neatly into a specific sub-genre are likely to be rather unoriginal and derivative. It's not just metal that subdivides into narrow genres; dance music is even worse.

My biggest pet hate is the way some people claim to love "progressive rock" and hate "prog rock", and then go on to define those two genres on some totally arbitrary basis purely in order to fit whatever bands they do or don't like in the right one.