Nationality of artists - Suggestions - Forums : Best Ever Albums

Romanelli
Bone Swah

Gender: Male
Location: Broomfield, Colorado

Moderator

Country of birth has been the root of a lot of arguments...and country of birth may be the least single accurate way of determining an individual. For instance:

Freddie Mercury again. Born in Zanzibar, live there until age 23. His career began well after he relocated to the UK, in exclusively bands that were formed in the UK. Do you flag Mercury with his birth flag? Mercury never recorded while he was a resident of Zanzibar.

John Butler of The John Butler Trio is flagged as an Austrailian artist, and his band is also flagged as Austrailian. However, Butler was born in California, where he lived until only the age of 11. So do we change those flags to US? Which would be completely unrepresentative of the artist and the band, considering that he never played a professional show...or, more importantly to BEA, never recorded a note of music in that country.

There are far too many examples like this...they are literally everywhere. More accurate is where the artist established their professional recording career. Where they are known for being from as a recording artist. Sure, it's good for them to be known as from where they were born...but that's really not the function of BEA.

I agree that there will be instances where mixed is the only way. But let's figure out ways to make that really the last resort. Let's figure out how to use it as infrequently as we can, instead of using it whenever there's the slightest opportunity to do so.
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melisandre

Location: the swamp

Bands don’t really have nationalities so country of formation is much better. But with solo artists and collaborations it only makes sense to state nationalities. This is the difficulty I can see. I think the only solution is for country to mean something different for bands and solo artists. This would just need to be made clear on the artist editing page.

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Romanelli wrote:

Country of birth has been the root of a lot of arguments...and country of birth may be the least single accurate way of determining an individual. For instance:

Country of birth would be wholly accurate if the purpose of that became country of birth/band formation instead of nationality. The difficulty becomes using that field for capturing 'nationality', and for many instances this isn't clear-cut because BEA doesn't use country of residence etc as this can be transitory. I've noticed some other websites use two or more fields to capture country of birth/formation *and* current location which somewhat gets around this, although that's a lot more data to maintain and more difficult to keep up-to-date, and doesn't quite capture the idea of nationality.

Romanelli wrote:

I agree that there will be instances where mixed is the only way. But let's figure out ways to make that really the last resort. Let's figure out how to use it as infrequently as we can, instead of using it whenever there's the slightest opportunity to do so.

Unless we make it absolutely clear-cut, I don't think this issue can be resolved without the problem resurfacing down the line. We definitely need to refine the rules, or redraw them, for the site to function in a better way. I'm now thinking it won't be possible to get to a simple set a guidelines that can capture nationality in a way that that's not overly subjective without making the contents more factual.

melisandre wrote:

Bands don’t really have nationalities so country of formation is much better. But with solo artists and collaborations it only makes sense to state nationalities. This is the difficulty I can see. I think the only solution is for country to mean something different for bands and solo artists. This would just need to be made clear on the artist editing page

Agree in the sense that a band doesn't have its own nationality, but country of formation isn't always representative of nationality, e.g. for examples outlined by Romanelli. I do agree it's the simplest solution for capturing origin if the purpose of that field was redefined and/or additional fields added to support it.

melisandre

Location: the swamp

albummaster wrote:

Country of birth would be wholly accurate if the purpose of that became country of birth/band formation instead of nationality. The difficulty becomes using that field for capturing 'nationality', and for many instances this isn't clear-cut because BEA doesn't use country of residence etc as this can be transitory. I've noticed some other websites use two or more fields to capture country of birth/formation *and* current location which somewhat gets around this, although that's a lot more data to maintain and more difficult to keep up-to-date, and doesn't quite capture the idea of nationality.

Unless we make it absolutely clear-cut, I don't think this issue can be resolved without the problem resurfacing down the line. We definitely need to refine the rules, or redraw them, for the site to function in a better way. I'm now thinking it won't be possible to get to a simple set a guidelines that can capture nationality in a way that that's not overly subjective without making the contents more factual.

Agree in the sense that a band doesn't have its own nationality, but country of formation isn't always representative of nationality, e.g. for examples outlined by Romanelli. I do agree it's the simplest solution for capturing origin if the purpose of that field was redefined and/or additional fields added to support it.

Yeah, I like having the objectivity of it, which simplifies things. And I could also ultimately go with birthplace for solo artists as their country by adding this into the definition. It’s what allmusic seems to do and I like the clarity of this site. Seems unlikely that we would be able to come up with a different and better solution to this conundrum than allmusic Smile

SD100852

albummaster wrote:

Country of birth would be wholly accurate if the purpose of that became country of birth/band formation instead of nationality. The difficulty becomes using that field for capturing 'nationality', and for many instances this isn't clear-cut because BEA doesn't use country of residence etc as this can be transitory. I've noticed some other websites use two or more fields to capture country of birth/formation *and* current location which somewhat gets around this, although that's a lot more data to maintain and more difficult to keep up-to-date, and doesn't quite capture the idea of nationality.

Unless we make it absolutely clear-cut, I don't think this issue can be resolved without the problem resurfacing down the line. We definitely need to refine the rules, or redraw them, for the site to function in a better way. I'm now thinking it won't be possible to get to a simple set a guidelines that can capture nationality in a way that that's not overly subjective without making the contents more factual.

Agree in the sense that a band doesn't have its own nationality, but country of formation isn't always representative of nationality, e.g. for examples outlined by Romanelli. I do agree it's the simplest solution for capturing origin if the purpose of that field was redefined and/or additional fields added to support it.

Things can also be further complicated by factors such as if artists/bands that originated from Northern Ireland identify as Irish or British for example. Plus you also have groups such as Nightwish and Viagra Boys who are both widely identified as Finnish and Swedish respectively even though the current lead vocalists of both were not born in those countries

Stevo796

Gender: Male
Age: 31
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland

This may be opening up a huge can of worms, but would there be an appetite to split up the UK's countries? I'd love to be able to explore the best Scottish/Welsh albums, and it may help with solving the Northern Irish issue above?

I could see that just adding another layer of complexity to the whole thing though...

Arthurknight
Hi

Gender: Male
Age: 26

I'm surprised I haven't yet seen something like this suggested but in my opinion at the top of the hierarchy of criteria for defining an artist or group's nationality should be the the nationality which has been expressed by the artists themselves. Artist provided biographies and self-description when clearly articulated should trump all. Moreover, we have a tendency to label POC immigrant artists in Western countries on ethnic grounds and this is not always in line with the artist's identity.

This effectively resolves almost all examples provided in this thread and others on this topic excepting two conditions:

1. The artist(s) have not clearly expressed the nationality of their group, assuming that the nationality is itself not already obvious (country of origin, formation, and currently based in are the same or heavily weighted in one direction).

2. the artist(s) have expressed a more complex sense of nationality than which can currently be represented by the existing system.

In the case of this first category of issues, it then makes the most sense to ask the question: Why does the artist/group not communicate a clear sense of nationality? Might it be misleading to try to impose one on it? Or, alternatively, do we strip an artist/group of identity and/or statehood by denationalising them? This – I think – gets us more immediately to the heart of the question of why we label artists with a nationality: to locate the cultural context that shapes their work. I find that in almost all cases where nationality is foggy the artist(s) have engaged this question in some capacity already even if not explicitly and this should be used to determine our designation.

In the case of the second category, we really have two options: Improve the system or give primacy to part of an artist(s) nationality.

Right now, we can basically do two things with nationality: clearly label an artist/group as 1 nationality, or clearly label a collaborative project/group as multi-national. The most obvious additional category to include is bi-nationality. This likely resolves 90% of cases where currently we run into issues. Until that is done we will continue to debate whether country of origin or occupation is more important and ignore the bigger picture. What about tri-nationality you ask? Quad-nationality? When will it stop you say! I'd argue that the multi-national label exists for this reason and wouldn't go away if a secondary country label was added.

SD100852

Stevo796 wrote:

This may be opening up a huge can of worms, but would there be an appetite to split up the UK's countries? I'd love to be able to explore the best Scottish/Welsh albums, and it may help with solving the Northern Irish issue above?

I could see that just adding another layer of complexity to the whole thing though...

I was thinking that could work well too, especially as you have bands such as the Manic Street Preachers where being Welsh is a huge part of their identity.