Random Sunday musings

I'm getting to like the online stream on PlanetRock. At least there's not too much pretentious nonsense under the garb of Classic Rock. It's becoming increasingly clear that the most popular genres in art, film and music have their genesis in a post-analytic need to classify and never manage to be complete or authoritative or definitive. Some even have a safety valve definition which refers to a period in history as opposed to a style (e.g. funk, film noir). I seem to accept Paul Schrader's definition of film noir as a period in filmmaking that wrote the parameters of a style for future filmmakers to follow. Any modern works that used them (including the works of Alfred Hitchcock, the genre-blending Blade Runner and more recent works like Memento and the Coen Brothers' noir tribute The Man Who Wasn't There) can be classified as tributes to that age of filmmaking. Funk and even rock suffer from the same problem. As do the numerous sub-genres of rock. Then there's my own metric to differentiate between a blues song (in the 12-bar form, variations allowed) and a bluesy song.