Classification: Forefather of Prejudice

The simple act of classifying something is an interesting conundrum. On one hand it is extremely helpful, allowing us to group externally similar objects together for some kind of purpose. On the other side of the coin, it may cause us to generalize things without an extensive examination of them. This prejudice against a group results in some lame fundamentalist-style closed-mind thinking.

This whole idea came to my head when I was having a discussion with my friend about different types of music genres. Most of them are fairly simple and on-point. for example hip-hop, metal, country are all distinctive genres. When you hear the term hip-hop, or classic rock, you pretty much know what to expect. Then you have these bullshit, incomplete labels like 'alternative', or 'progressive'. The always credible Wikipedia.com says that '[the 'alternative' label ]is also used in the music industry to denote "the choices available to consumers via record stores, radio, cable television, and the Internet." That obviously seems to be more of an 'alternative' choice; only because every other genre of music already does that...

My 'beef' with the alternative title is not with the music itself, but with the nondescript jerkoff who first grouped a bunch of different songs together, and just said to his assistant,
'ehh just call it alternative, I don't know what the hell all of this is."

I feel like giving a band an 'alternative' label, is basically saying '"Oh this band is similar to a different band, but not exactly". This is a pretty unclear description.

Chances are, if you referred to a race of people as 'alternative', they probably wouldn't enjoy the title too much. I wouldn't be able to picture an obese manager with a nice, floppy set of funbags at McDonald's wanting to hire a bunch of 'alternatives' to work late night shifts or Happy Meal Thursdays.

To conclude the ideas that my introduction presented; putting things in groups may seem like they simplify things, but they actually prevent people from focusing on what separates them.
And it reality, when Carolus Linnaeus( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus), thought he was doing everybody a favor by simplifying things, he was really just giving genocidal maniacs some bad ideas.