Music Genres

[Norah]

Let's be real, most Newbury Comics employees were real fucking douchebags about their music.

You think? Which one did you go to?
The one in Peabody was my go-to, and it was awesome. Once I moved to Cambridge, I migrated over to their Harvard Sq store, and those people were dickheads. The Mass Ave one always sucked too.

I knew a bunch of people who worked at the Braintree store in the early aughts and god damn they were insufferable.

[tragabigzanda]

[epilogue]

I think it's generational. If you're, today, younger than 31, you probably, for some strange reason, value these delineations. But if you're older than 31, today, you probably don't give a shit. This sub-sub-ultra-genre thing is a fairly new phenomena. I'm not saying that helps or hurts the value of such delineations. I'm just saying. I think the older you are, the less this kind of thing matters to you personally, in general.

I, for one, hate them. They feel SUPER arbitrary to me. "Emo," for example, is such a ridiculous and reductive sub-genre classification that it makes me physically ill when people use it.

[bodysnatcher]

there's a guy at a store i regularly go to, and all he recommends is just bizarre shit that's like $40 for a record (limited pressing!) and it'll be just some dude moaning for 60 minutes over a single violin note.

was that the radiohead opener?

[Brett]

I don't see a problem with specific delineations of broader genre groups. Like LV, I find it can be handy with styles that are very broad and long-lasting, like electronic or jazz. Classifiers like IDM or ambient techno tell me that a particular electronic release would probably appeal to me more than one typed as something like breakbeat.

Of course, it's silly to be dogmatic or overly pedantic about them, and to argue what's what is a waste of time.

[BurtReynolds]

It's really not that hard to hear the differences between these subgenres. There is a lot of metal I don't listen to, but I could listen to Stoner/Doom all day. It does me no good for someone to recommend a band because I like "metal".

[BurtReynolds]

And if you're not listening to Retro Darkwave Horror Synth I can't even take your musical tastes seriously.

[Kevin Davis]

I always grumble about how ludicrous these minute genre distinctions are, and they are certainly useless to me in all but the broadest terms, but if they help people navigate their listening in some kind of meaningful way, it's not like they really hurt anything. When I first began noticing the proliferation of these subgenres, they always seemed to be attached to some flavor-of-the-month fashion trend or some other aesthetic qualifier that may have been common among bands in the "genre" but didn't strike me as necessarily musical, and the folks that bought into them deferred so blindly and uncritically to them that honest discussion of music on its own terms became virtually impossible; everyone was
so hung up with where everything "belonged," and all the baggage and implications that came along with that. I will be forever suspicious of over-categorizing as a result of this, though that kind of militant deference to genre lines has diminished as time has gone on and the company I keep has grown up and developed more eclectic tastes in general.

Personally, very little of my own listening has ever been driven by following genres, or "X is like Y" recommendations, or anything of that nature. What ultimately draws me to an artist is usually more ephemeral than a series of objectively defined musical traits; I rarely assume that because I like one artist that sounds a certain way that I'll therefore like another artist who sounds similar, partially because a surface-level sound can only tell you so much about the music, and partially because the exercise has simply paid off for me so infrequently. Because I like Bob Dylan, people for years would send me MySpace or YouTube links everytime they found some shitty folkie with a newsboy hat and a harmonica around his neck, and that's just not how it works. I like Bob Dylan because he's him, and because there are singular things about his writing, singing, playing, and general artistry that speak to me, not because he makes "Greenwich Village Coffeehouse Folk," or whatever obscure label one might make up for that particular musical niche. A lot of times the groupings don't make sense to me anyway -- like, I've commonly heard Weezer, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Death Cab for Cutie all described as "emo" bands, and to me these bands sound nothing alike. They all share more-than-occasional themes of romantic woe, perhaps, but that's hardly a unique enough trait around which to base a genre. So I just listen to everything as though it's its own thing.

[LoathedVermin72]

Weezer: Power Pop, Alternative Rock, Pop Rock
SDRE: Emo, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
DCFC: Indie Pop, Indie Folk, Indie Rock

Emo has become a dumb term people try to use derisively when talking about any rock band with a male singer whose voice is high/whiny.

I will say the one type of genre qualifier that bothers me is when it's region-based, such West Coast Hip-Hop, East Coast Hip-Hop, Midwest Emo, or even Grunge, which I think actually WAS a specific sound before the term became widely misused and applied to a ton of Seattle bands that didn't have that sound. That truly is not based on sonic traits at all.

[Kevin Davis]

Are those from Rate Your Music, LV? What does that same aggregator say about Jimmy Eat World?

[LoathedVermin72]

Yeah, but I'm truncating a bit.

JEW: Alternative Rock, Emo, Power Pop

[Kevin Davis]

I was curious if they'd get the "emo" sticker. To me JEW have more musically in common with Weezer than they do with Sunny Day Real Estate, despite Weezer missing the "emo" tag, so maybe the lesson is that I really just have no idea what drives these things. Fortunately we live in an age where it's equally convenient to just check out a song or two by an artist as it is to research their potential appeal based on genre descriptors.

[BurtReynolds]

I've always heard them referred to as emo, but didn't really understand why either.

[LoathedVermin72]

I think it's mainly due to their early albums. Clarity, Static Prevails, and Singles definitely fall within Emo territory, IMO.

[Teeeeeekay]

I always delete genre tags from my music.

[TremorJam]

Anytime I download any PJ and see the "AlternaRock" or something similar, I change it to Rock. Genre labels are hilarious sometimes. Weezer is considered Emo? Really? I like what I like and try not to pay attention to the labels.

[darth_vedder]

Yeah, same. I try to keep it simple and mainly keep things under "rock", "hip hop", "country" "classical", "jazz". There are a few others, but I try to fit most under those root genres.

[E.H. Ruddock]

I downloaded some Barrington Levy recently and the genre was something like "Dancehall Reggae pre-2003". :/

[tragabigzanda]

[mf]

deep genrefication in metal = useful (to me)

genrefication in other types of music i listen to = not so much