"The Periodic Table"

The periodic table, a.k.a. the periodic table of the elements, is an ordered arrangement of the chemical elements into rows (periods) and columns (groups). Ordered, structured and precise in every aspect. Sometimes I wish there was a table for gothic country. One of the reasons to why I started this website was that I thought I could bring some order to the chaos. How naive. To classify you need agreed and accepted standards. Objective criteria and norms refer to independent, measurable, and verifiable standards used to make fair, consistent decisions or evaluations, uninfluenced by personal emotions, biases, or subjective opinions. There are no agreed and accepted standards in the genre. Only, to a greater or lesser extent, substantiated opinions. The task to bring some order to the genre is insurmountable. For example, trying to decompose the genre into trunk, branch, twig and leaf isn't easy. Which is the main genre and which is the subgenre? Exactly when, how and why does gothic country turn into gothic americana? How do you distinguish Southern Gothic from other Gothic traditions? I could go on. My contribution is the geographical origin as the basis of classification. Sounds fail-safe, but how do classify a band like The Devil Makes Three who started out in Vermont (Northeast), but moved and are now based in Californa (West). I made it simple and chose "first" origin. There is (was) a site called Every Noise at Once, check it out here (opens in a new window). The site is an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for genre-shaped distinctions at Spotify. The guy who ran it lost his job at Spotify and eventually his access to their data. But even before that the site came up with some pretty wild and crazy ideas of artists and bands belonging to different genres/subgenres. Such important tasks cannot be left to machines. Humans beat machine. Every time.