One of the causalities of my PLEX music library crashing was a feature that is not wholly unique to PLEX but is strange absent by default in a lot of others: Country of Origin.
There are a lot of musicians that carry their nationality with them in their style and presentation but are also not completely limited to it. Generally there is nothing to stop someone from another country from having a similar style. Sometimes language does make an impact about what kind of sounds work best, but even then, well…
However, there are times where the country/language get heavily linked to the genre identifier and this specific to some countries.
You don’t tend to see The Ramones sold under US-Punk while The Clash gets hit with UK-Punk. That gets brought up, sure, but it’s not treated like a meaningful genre signifier.
When you buy some Japanese music, though, it might be labeled as precisely as J-Rock or J-Pop or J-Rap (sometimes J-Pop gets used to absorb all of these).
I’ve also seen World Music, International Music, and other variations of that get slapped to pretty much any non-English track. The one that irritates is me is seeing entire Japanese language albums listed as “Anime” for a genre. And I’m not just talking about those singles used as anime OP/ED.
There are of course some situations where a country code works in an absolutely meaningful way. A lot of what I call K-Pop sounds like K-Pop to me (as a term I don’t precisely limit to to music from South Korea). And some J-Pop is pretty unique to itself (before we even get to distinct subgenres like City Pop). There are plenty variations of folk music and scene music. Some of the latter blends out with the Internet but even now you can find moments where some chunks of the world are producing a specific sound.
There can also be a relative meaning. Japanese style shoegaze can have differences than shoegaze from other places.
It is just, overall, I don’t treat The Pillows as substantially different than The Smashing Pumpkins, Pommelien Thijs as substantially different than Paloma Morphy, or Band-Maid as different from The Warning.
The latter, by the way, sort of inspired this. The way that The Warning don’t get slapped with M-Rock while a Japanese band might be slapped with the J-.
AND TO BE CLEAR, I AM NOT SAYING YOU DO THIS. You are probably fine. I mean, frankly, I don’t care if you come up with a half dozen country and locale codes. “This is Vlaanderen Muziek, or as I like to say, BeVla-Pop.” Knock yourself out, Space Pilgrims.
At any rate, my plan is just to build a custom MP3/M4A tag, Country, and apply it to all my “J-” bands and then swap out their genres into a few categories. Alt, Shoegaze, Rap, whatever. I’m not going to speed run it. Just tweak it a bit. I thought about doing the same for language but frankly that’s unnecessary. This is my own music library. If I ever get into the moment where I just have to hear a French-language song, I’m sure I can figure something out.
NMIXX might get their own genre as NMIXX, though. I don’t know.
PLEX tags, how I miss you.
