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Ever since I started digitizing my music library, I’ve struggled with the pronunciation of the word “genre.” I started out saying John Ree, perhaps imagining him as a pioneer in the field of music classification; sort of a spiritual ancestor to the Music Genome Project. Later, I adopted the slurred buzzing intonation that inhabits a kind of Transylvania between the letters “G” and “J” – while retaining a very down-to-earth terminal “ree.” As it turns out, there are two options for correctly pronouncing the word – neither of which I had inferred.

Even more frustrating than the pronunciation of genre is its application to a large music library. Of course, nobody can quite agree on what to call a particular style, whether or not to include a group in that definition, and how that definition should ultimately be formatted. As a result, I have been left with 195 genres, most of which are horrendous chimeras of entities once resembling words. The ten (ten!) variations on “alternative” are, by themselves,  enough to cause me physical pain.

Over time, I have organized my music by artist and album – more recently going through and ensuring that albums have artwork (if at all possible) and have been played at least once. The last column in iTunes to be tamed is genre; even the thought of beginning such lugubrious work causes me to feel chilled. Indeed, does one consistently put an artist into a genre, or does their evolution require a new evaluation with each album? How about that one song on an album that doesn’t fit? Does that get its own label or must it be squished in amongst its appropriately-labeled brethren? Would anything be lost if I replaced all genre classification with “music?”