oh, HORRORS!! not categories!!..someone might have to think! *big grin*
...you ALL use categories everyday, but some 'folks' want them to eternally fuzzy and ambiguous so they can fit their own likes & dislikes into convenient terms.
I like a certain 'flavor' of music more than others. I like 'mostly' older songs and songs with general characteristics that are a bit different than many of the newer songs. When I discovered them, 'folk' was a good term that described them...and I could be reasonably sure that I would like most of what I heard at a 'folk' club' or found in the 'folk' bin at the music store. That has changed...and I don't care for loud, electic Celtic!

Now, I would like to be able to refer to those songs without writing an entire paragraph with 27 disclaimers and subordinate clauses. What would you suggest I call it?

I understand that jazz is struggling to keep hip-hop from being subsumed, and I know that traditional Bluegrass is resisting having 'Newgrass' slipped into their venues.....and so it goes.

So...you anti-category folks...you tell me...what are we to do? Some of you say."..oh, I just call music good or bad...lets pick"....but try opening a music store with no labels on the record ummm....CD bins!

The late Chet Atkins sort of apologized for what he did to 'country' music as a category, and I doubt it will ever recover.

Fine, refuse to deal with it....but you are just hiding your head in the sand...(and frogmore..Duke Ellington may have SAID that, but what he PLAYED fit a category)