For many artists, it’s pretty easy to be categorized into a specific genre of music.

If you lay down rhymes on a “phat beat,” you’re considered hip hop. If you go by a name such as the “Dixie Chicks,” you’re most obviously country.

But where does the post-punk folkster Dan Bern fit in?

For many, he fits in somewhere between Bob Dylan and Henry Rollins. One journalist tried to describe him as “topical-political-poetical-sarcastic-punk-folk,” — but a name like that just doesn’t roll off the tongue.

For Bern, who dresses like a hard-core rocker and sings with a beautiful tenor voice, the fans are the ones who decide what he is.

And he always keeps them guessing.

During his concerts, Bern switches from comedic to anger-filled conjectures, then dabbles in theology and science fiction before besmirching pop culture.

He switches from the folk music staple of an acoustic guitar to his pink solid-body in the same fashion of a 1965 Bob Dylan — and he gives a mean Dylan imitation.

He doesn’t favor friendly meditations, but instead wrestles with the domesticated-folk tradition. He denounces corporate America one minute, then pretends to be a redneck drinking beer with a rabbi the next.

He sometimes switches to shards of Nirvana songs on a whim.

Bern got his sense of anger from being an outsider. His parents escaped Nazi Germany and landed in Iowa, one of only a few Jewish families. He inherited his musical talent from his father, an accomplished composer and music teacher.

Bern, who has lived like a nomad for most of his 32 years, has been traveling the country writing songs compulsively and playing his music to an attentive public.

He is currently touring in support of his second album “Fifty Eggs,” which was produced by punk-folk icon Ani DiFranco.

He opens “Fifty Eggs” with the blazing “Tiger Woods,” in which he proclaims, “I got big balls/ It ain’t bragging if it’s true,” and then goes on with the thought provoking, “Aliens came and fucked the monkey/ How else explain Mozart” on the Evolution Theory challenger, “Missing Link.”

In other songs, Bern shares his ideas that once a cure for AIDS is found, worldwide orgies will break out. He also muses that if you have sex with Madonna at a young age, the rest of your life will seem anti-climactic.

With such an eclectic array of music coming from Bern’s mind, it is hard to pin him down as a folk artist.

Perhaps he was best described when DiFranco once said, “He’s the only guy I know who catches more flack than me. … He must be doing something right. Dan Bern’s the shit.”

Dan Bern will play at the Maintenance Shop tonight at 7 and 9:30. Tickets are $7 for students and $8 general admission.