I just found this, and so far it's awesome!

You basically enter your preference (artist or song or genre) and then it starts a "six degrees of music"-style chain of listing, creating a playlist based on exploring different sources for the same type of music.

So rad! Give it a go.

EDIT: I tried to make the poll as comprehensive as possible, so as to avoid the almost inevitable comment of "I didn't vote cause my choice wasn't there" but I was limited to 10 options, so I had to compress some of the options to include a broader range.

Heh. I think I first heard about this thing on here a few weeks back.

Wasn't that site linked here a long time ago already?

eeuuhh... yeah.. as Moleculor said...

Just a nitpick:

Ska should be paired with raggae, since that's where it's origins are. Punk is a completely different genre.

well, if we're nitpicking, Blues should be placed with Jazz, rap, and I suppose classical music, which also hails to medieval music and finally bone-hitting-log music.

So get with the fucking program, HB.

Raven

Not sure if you're just being a smart-ass or not, Raven, but by "origins", I mean the immediate antecedents of the genre.

Ska came about when rock music became popular in the Carribean. Local reggae bands, playing live gigs, were asked to play the new songs (as there were no "rock" bands there). However, their playing style (and instruments) had a reggae "accent". Rock + "reggae accent" = ska.

Jazz (and it's decendants) are an offshoot of blues, but evolved into a variation that hold very little in common with it's ancestor--especially if you include "cool jazz", "fusion", and anything that could conceivably be played by Kenny G.

Blues is much more closely linked with it's direct "child", Rock & Roll. They share much of the same instrumentation, form, feel, and content.

Rap is only a step-child of Blues, but owes its origins to street poetry. It didn't start as music at all, but as something to fill the spaces between music. DJs--still spinning vinyl back then--needed something to keep the audience interested and moving between songs, filled the gaps with poetry that mimicked the rhythm of the music. Eventually, the rapping became more popular than the music it was tying together. It wasn't until rap gained credibility that it started pulling in real instrumentation and tied itself, retroactively, to rock and--minimally--blues. It's closer to being an illegitimate child of Motown.

And neither blues nor (traditional) jazz have any more than a minor connection to medieval music, since they originated with traditional African tribal music. This is especially apparent in the most basic rhythms of both blues and jazz--and even more so in rock & roll; the 4/4 rhythm with the accents on 2 & 4 mimics the human heart beat. The slaves in the American south took their traditional music and put a "white" veneer on it to appease their masters. Traditional black gospel music still has a primitive and powerful beat to it; far different from the complex (and often convoluted) forms of European religious music.

And finally, the variations of "modern" jazz are little more than pansy-boys masterbating with their horns and calling it "jazz"--while being disdainful of the "musically-limited plebians" who "just don't understand their art"-- in order to cover up the fact that they don't have enough musical skills to even read the music in a piano primer book.

:)

That would be absolutely true, if I was only limiting it to 1st wave (and possibly early 2nd wave) ska, but as it stands, anything more recent shares a lot with punk, and the lines are getting thinner by the minute.

Reggae has more or less managed to stay as a genre in its own right, whereas ska's been steadily moving more and more to the punk side of things for the last 10-15 years, so I figured they were more aptly placed together.

If I had to crunch it down any further, rock and blues would've been combined.

Ultimately, it probably could've been compressed into two categories:

"Whitey"
"Negro"

But I thought that might be oversimplifying, just a touch. :wink:

I'm sitting here trying to figure out if Belle and Sebastian and the Decemberists are "Rock/Metal" or "Folk"