Kind of Blue

@tylermunns

Actually, I haven’t had the experience you describe.

And, as a creative person whose played guitar for 50 years, has a studio art degree in drawing/printmaking and enjoys photography and writing poetry, implying I'm  someone who disrespects/devalues the arts or artists is absurd,

As you sound emotionally triggered by this topic, I don’t see much possibility for rational conversation.

@mahgister

I’m speaking purely in practical terms, not in terms of "pigeonholing " or otherwise restricting artists. Would you also reject the use of the Dewey Decimal System in libraries?

Do Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, and Rush all sound the same? Of course not. Why should Tubular Bells be any different? Prog rock covers a lot of territory.

@stuartk Having a system that allows customers or patrons to efficiently locate a thing (dedicated aisles in a grocery store, Dewey Decibel system in a library, etc.) is helpful.  
Describing music to another person is different.  
Conflating the two things is false equivalence.

“And, as a creative person whose played guitar for 50 years, has a studio art degree in drawing/printmaking and enjoys photography and writing poetry, implying I'm  someone who disrespects/devalues the arts or artists is absurd
As you sound emotionally triggered by this topic, I don’t see much possibility for rational conversation.”

After you said such qualms were “extreme” and “getting undies in a twist,” I went on to further clarify why I took issue with label/genre-mongering. You took it personally (i.e. ‘…as a creative person whose played guitar for 50 years…’).  
I’m the “triggered” one, the one with comprised rationality.
Sure. You bet.  
The ol’ “you’re emotional/irrational” dismissal bit. An oldie-but-goodie.

Instead of saying an artist is (blank), what if we…Egads! Heaven forbid!…described the music?  You know, with words.  
That’s an option.  
Is I already said, applying some generic label contrived by record companies/radio stations/Rolling-frickin’-Stone magazine God-knows-how-many-years, labels invented to make it easier for them to become more rich, labels that rarely, if ever, provide an accurate/useful description, we could just use our words to describe something.  
Just a thought.

@mahgister

I’m speaking purely in practical terms, not in terms of "pigeonholing " or otherwise restricting artists. Would you also reject the use of the Dewey Decimal System in libraries?

I already admitted that this is practical... Labels are inevitable...😁

I class my music by names of composers and very large denomination : classical and Jazz and Arabic , Persian And Indian and South America and chinese and others ...

I never proposed to trash Dewey... 😊

I only said that labels with too much sub-sub-sub labellings  too much details like the 60 possible  jazz  genre distinctions are less useful than names of musicians for me and in a way restricting passed some  threshold ... General classification of jazz by years and era are enough for me ...

Once this is said i can understand why some musician can hate labelling ...

No poet like to be put in a drawer...

I agree entirely with simonmoon’s and sturartk’s comments and I see no need to react defensively. simon’s description of Jazz as a genre is pretty darn good. Seems to me that there is a lot of value in being able to accurately describe what it is that defines a genre.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the classification of music by genre or sub genre, even when the lines get blurred and it has to be done in broad(er) terms. Classification does not, in any way, give any one genre ultimate “superiority” nor “inferiority” as an art form if there is respect for the idea that “there are are only two kinds of music, good and bad”. An idea that, interestingly enough, was promulgated by and is most commonly associated with a Jazz artist. Duke Ellington, one of the greatest.

I believe that sometimes there is confusion about what that idea actually means and was intended to mean. It does not suggest that music should not be classified (by genre), or that there is no value in doing so. Rather, it is about recognizing and respecting the simple fact that in any genre there can be good music, just as there can be bad. There is a tendency on the part of some to put an entire genre of music that is liked on a pedestal higher than that of music that is not liked (understood), as concerns artistic value and validity. Level of creativity and emotional impact are barometers that apply to all genres and keeping an open mind can only be a good thing.