Why Genre Still Matters (A Response to Polyphonic)

It's a dark day for the Ghost Notes fandom.

So, a funny thing happened to me recently. I was watching the recent Polyphonic video about the death of genre, and suddenly, Noah called me out. By name! He challenged me to explain the academic perspective on genre, and I can't just say no to that sort of thing, so here I am stepping up and doing it. Musical genre's a really complicated thing, but it's also really important to how we understand and relate to the music we love, so let's dig in and try to figure it all out!

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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold!

[scuttlefield]

Just realized that "Fight me, Polyphonic" has the same syllables as "Rock me, Amadeus", so now I have that song with new lyrics going through my head.

[nicosotheraccount]

"If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, is that a sick beat?"

[EmilyAllen-eoxc]

The thing about "by definition, everything is music" is that it's kind of underscored by the running joke of "drone/ambient fan spends 15 minutes entranced by a new song they later discover is a piece of industrial machinery running in the background", which while very funny does actually happen sometimes in my experience, meaning that in a way music is defined by our capacity to enjoy it as music, and if you expand that capacity the scope of what can be considered expands with it.
Like I have unironically sat down and enjoyed the sound of a generator running. it's like listening to birdsong, but for fans of underground metal.

[rowanbowers]

The reports of Genre's death were ... greatly exaggerated

[spddiesel]

Beavis and Butthead perfectly defined metal back in the early 90's: "drums, guitars, and death! They finally got it right!"

[ferresmeets]

This feels like the start of a split in youtube music theory discourse akin to how literary academics started infighting in the 20th century to eventually create a bigger picture surrounding literature

[JoeyPsych]

To me genre is a way to describe a song to somebody who hasn't heard the song before

[thjnz]

Holy shit, the NFT ape representing the idea of obsoleteness followed by "I'll get off my soapbox" was... beautiful. Art. Well played.

[GiveZeeAChance]

When I stopped viewing genre as a description of the musical mechanics at play and instead a marker of community, the lines made a lot more sense to me

[strifera]

I think this piece was missing a deeper discussion of genre as an artifact of the sharing/selling of music/musical performances. It was addressed tangentially, but genres act as a way for music to be marketed and for audiences to find what they are looking for, a sort of less rigid Dewey decimal system for media. Some genres are entirely created or maintained for that purpose. Plenty of "Christmas songs" have no mention of Christmas in them. "Kids' music" can be as varied as a genre can be and is defined purely by target audience. Absent the role of genres in creating and experiencing media, they will always fundamentally arise from and be reinforced by needing a way to discuss it.

More lines might be drawn and the lines people care about might change, but the lines will always be there and be important.

[klanggemaldemusic]

Ah, yes, the Fabri Paper. It played a big part in my master thesis. I applied it to Nu Metal to show how genres might influence each other. So, I strongly believe we need genre for context, to put a piece of music into relation to other ones and find out the nuance of compositional techniques in a piece of music. After all, no piece of music exists on its own, always in an environment with other pieces. To draw the lines of relationships through genre can help to see stylistic devices and how they develop. Again, Nu Metal is a great example of that.
...
Thanks for the video to put the gerne discussion into perspective.

[DC_Prox]

I haven't finished the video yet, but so far I suspect this has a lot to do with the divide between the ways people actually use language and the ways that some select academics would like language to be used, and then the academics forget that they don't dictate how language forms so they get confused and frustrated that the rest of the world isn't playing along.

[davidg]

When I was in high school, we were arguing that genres are dying and music discussions often delved into micro-genres.
When I went back to university, after a ~10 year break, I would chuckle to myself as I heard students at the coffee shops and on the quad arguing that genres are dying and hearing them discuss music in terms of micro-genres.
Roughly 10 years later, I'm now watching this video response about whether genres are dying and how relevant micro-genres are.
Long story short? Genres evolve, there's a lot of interaction between genres, and every generation thinks they're the ones that broke it all.* 😆

*Case in point, and exactly as you said approaching the end about new music being a re-envisioning of music people grew up with from their parents, "modern no-wave" is pretty much first wave industrial but with more defined rhythm and better production values. (Think mid/late 70s to mid 80s, with Throbbing Gristle as the archetype.)

[AubriGryphon]

As with many, many things in life, genres are rigid boxes into which humans try to categorize unique items. Some items fit cleanly within the bounds of a single box, but some inevitably turn out fuzzier than the model is prepared to deal with, and that's a failing of the model, not of the item. Ask a planetary geologist how to identify a planet, asteroid, or moon. Ask a geneticist what a species is. Ask a sociologist about gender. You'll inevitably end up with some variation on, "Hoo boy... well, it's complicated." And so with genre.

[Team_Orchid]

As a diehard video game music enjoyer, boss battle is a huge genre, JRPG forest is a specific genre, ice level is a pretty big genre, and I could go on. I might not know the proper names of these genres, but I can tell they're different genres.

[Vontroll]

I think a huge component of "the demise of genre" are people people like me who grew up with MTV (back when they played music). They played rock, pop, rap, R&B, prog, etc. There are quite a few from my generation who were into both Hip Hop and Metal which probably wouldn't have happened earlier (just look at the folk/rock rivalry in the 60's or the hatred of disco and rise of punk in the 70's). Heck, now that the male country artists have stopped trying to sound like Garth Brooks and have gotten creative again, even the country vs rock barrier is eroding.

[StaticR]

to me genres have turned more into descriptive building blocks of musical practices, culture and sounds the piece may contain rather than a description of the musical experience as a whole.

In a way genres are more similar to how tempo and time signature describe a song than a description of the song's identity as a whole. One can describe an entire song all the way through, but also they're free to change at any point.
Genres are even more flexible as multiple can overlap at the exact same time without issue.

[Foodgeek]

Mosh pits at the symphony would be the bomb 😆

[Afishmechina]

The idea that genre is a culture is still there, it’s just more grouped together. I’m in high school, the alt kids or kids who would’ve been considered emo 15 or so years ago now are not defined by emo, but they also listen to a lot of punk, Nu metal, alt rock, etc.

[martifingers]

Perhaps one sign of the power of genres is what happens when a piece flouts the genre's conventions. For example Iris DeMent's "Wasteland of the Free" has most of the elements of a Nashville country song (instrumentation, chord progression, emotional lyrical delivery etc.) - save for the radical social critique of the lyrics that left me (for one) pretty stunned on first hearing.