Six Degrees of 33s

Genres5 articles

Genre as sourced data: walls, neighbours, clocks.

• Every Genre Has a Length

  Median song lengths across 212 genres form a ruler from grindcore (1:58) to symphony (8:17) — and each genre's number is a fossil of the medium it was born on. Doo-wop still keeps 45-rpm time. Techno still keeps 12-inch time. Country holds the three-minute line to the second.

• Inseparable

  The genre pairs most inseparably fused in practice — a Turkish nightclub, a Thai rice belt, one NME cassette from 1986, and a genre statistically inseparable from its own adjective.

• Is Kansas Prog?

  The database's answer to fifty years of record-fair argument: the artist file asserts eleven genres at once, the album trail shows progressive rock present 1974–1982, missing exactly 1983–1988, and back from 1995 — and the membership table shows where the prog went in the meantime. With a genre-climate reading of every side project.

• The Cult and the Colossus

  King's X and Rush are the same shape — a power trio, frozen for decades, worshipped by musicians. The graph measures the fame gap, and finds one perfect inversion — outside their band, all of Rush has 38 recordings; Doug Pinnick alone has 159.

• The Genres That Refuse to Touch

  Cross every genre label against every other and most pairs mingle freely — but thirty of the 276 headline pairings share zero artists, and twenty-one share exactly one. Meet the walls, and the people holding doors in them.