While many people could easily point out aspects of the music industry that suck, there’s one thing gaining traction lately that really needs to stop: creating and applying musical genres based solely on a group’s lyrics.

Music is sound. It’s a combination of many things, not just words. Placing all of the focus on the lyrics is detrimental to the rest of the music, and often wildly misleading when trying to describe the musicians’ overall sound.

For example, I’ve seen scores of music bloggers referring to bands as “Viking metal”…just because they’re metal bands who sing about Vikings and Norse mythology. That’s not enough; a band would still need to use classical Scandinavian musical stylings and extreme riffs in there, otherwise any metal song about the legendary northern warriors would instantly be considered Viking metal based on the lyrics alone. If that’s the case, then Led Zeppelin’s famous “Immigrant Song” is Viking metal. Ridiculous!

Next we have Swashbuckle, who are often referred to as “pirate metal.” Technically, this is incorrect: Swashbuckle may perform in pirate costumes and write lyrics about nautical nonsense, but they’re a thrash/death metal band. (Full disclosure: I’ve written about Swashbuckle for Musician Photo Journal, and even I’ve fallen prey to using the term “pirate metal.”)

Drifting away from metal, we have “nerd rock.” This is rock or punk music wherein the lyrics deal with topics such as comic books or video games. Again, it’s a piss-poor genre; just because your band sings about something that might be geek-related, that doesn’t change the riffs on your guitars, now does it? Case and point: look at “I am the Law,” a thrash metal classic by Anthrax. Using modern standards, this song would be classified as “nerd rock” because the subject is Judge Dredd, a comic book character. Clearly, this is wrong; no one would ever consider an Anthrax song to be nerd rock! So why are other songs with nerdy lyrics given that rubber stamp?

We all know the real reason for these misleading genres: money. If you advertise your group as a rock band, even though you happen to sing about Star Trek, you won’t get far. Promote yourself as a nerd rock band, however, and science fiction convention planners will be knocking down your door. Furthermore, nerdy lyrics and the like are often used as a cover to hide many bands’ lack of musical skill. Fanboys are much more likely to give a crappy rock band a free pass if they’re singing about Batman than if they were performing Top 40 songs.

I still think a band should stick to its guns and forgo these fake genres. Your music should always come first before selling out, but that’s not a popular opinion these days.