iGenre - iTunes and Biblical Studies

I’ve taught at various times on the different genres present within the biblical texts and there are some students who find the whole concept of genre really hard to grasp. So several times I’ve set up a game show in class with student participants called “Name that Genre!” I’ve taken a variety of different pieces of music representing different genres, loaded them into iTunes, given each participant a squeaky toy as a buzzer and run a game show - with the appropriate prizes of chocolate, of course. It works as a fun, general introduction to the concept of genre. Which like the concept of metaphor is alien to some people’s reading of the text. (See Douglas Coupland’s neologism “Metaphasia - the inability to recognise metaphor”)

In the process of the game though it becomes clear that the concept of genre is often a pretty fluid one. One person’s jazz is another person’s blues or another person’s gospel. And this gets hotly debated at some points. It’s the same too with the biblical texts. A gospel passage might be “gospel” genre to one person and “historical narrative” to another, or there’s debate of what kind of “lament” a psalm is, or why a “prophetic” text suddenly switches into “wisdom” genre.

I was thinking about this the other day when trying to sort out some music in iTunes. It only allows one genre to be assigned to each song. But what if I want to assign more than one genre to a song. In the end I’ve set up smart playlists that filters the comments field attached to a song. In the comments field I list the genres I want: for example, **jazz**, **blues** and then select using those “tags”. It’s clumsy but it works.