Do genres have a sell-by date?

Yes, absolutely. Genres die, just look at big band swing. Of course, there are always enthusiasts who continue to curate the museum (Cherry Poppin' Daddies.)

Pop will never die, because that's just music that's popular, sung with chords and a melody. Not really a genre.

I think in the larger scope, there are more curators -- or at least traditionalists -- than there are bleeding-edge types. It all just becomes an ever-expanding continuum with different means to an end.

Great question there. I think that the idea that genres have a sell- by date is bull. There is always going to be an early period of greater vitality and excitement where things keep moving forward, and where the music and its context feed on each other. But the people who keep trampling each other in a rush to proclaim genres dead are just trendoids. I love the fact that there are hundreds of genres around who, even know they aren't what they used to be, can still provide lasting pleasure. Great blues songs are a lot less likely to come out in 2001 than they would have in 1951, but if someone puts one out now, why knock it ? Being the new thing shouldn't be an end in itself.

I agree with Patrick, things evolve but generally don't die (unless they don't evolve, I suppose)...aside from the brief neo-swing trend, there are plenty of big bands doing new and interesting things with the form (Either/Orchestra, ICP Orchestra, even the Mingus Big Band).

I guess I can agree that the Either/Orchestra is a big band, which is maybe why they sounded boring to me. But the ICP? They seem a little... different. The big band conventions are too broken.

ICP Orchestra? Since when did the Insane Clown Posse start busting out the brass & woodwinds?

Genres become irrelevant only in terms of marketability. Rock isn't dead. The blues aren't dead. Techno isn't dead. Pop isn't dead, by a loooooong shot. It's just that the stringent images once associated with these genres (among MANY others) are totally invalid nowadays. And the images currently associated with these genres will become equally invalid soon enough. If you're going to accept, say, both Bon Jovi & Black Sabbath as "metal", or Johnny Cash & Tim McGraw as "country", you're going to have to be a VERY open-minded individual. Or not give two shits.

Genres only work to a point, though. They might be good as a guidepost for folks that aren't in the know, but that's the extent of it. Descriptions that resort to base & non-chalant label-flinging are ultimately lazy & useless. But, then, that depends on the situation. For instance, if you're writing an article about a writer than knows a member of Tortoise, I GUESS it's OK to refer to said member as, say, "indie-rock drummer John McEntire". But when you're writing in a mag like _Magnet_ or _Mojo_, you'd better leave the goddamn genres in your _Rolling Stone Guide to Flatulent Music Writing_.

(In case you couldn't tell, this is a pet peeve of mine. I'm guilty of it, too. That makes me angrier.)

I remember Mr. Reynolds having something quite apropos to say on this topic (fancy that) -- that in the future (now?) the affirmative "that rocks" may be as irrelevant a valuation as "that really swings" has become. Not that guitar rock nor any other genre will die, but will pass into a comfortable appreciative niche, the way jazz has. I already feel that way about jungle. The urgency has gone for me, Jungle Nation in NYC is no longer essential, but I still get goosebumps when I hear Scorpio's "Trouble"... people will keep making the music they love, but the social ramifications it has may have fled to other voices, other rooms...

Josh: I suppose you're right, ICP Orchestra doesn't really operate or feel like a big band, more like a jazz combo with a whole bunch of guys. I've actually only heard them once a friend's house, but it was interesting and cool. I have the vague idea (probably from reading about it) that there are some European radio big bands doing some weird shit though.

Point of clarification: "That swings" has many and appropriate uses for modern music. Notably, new-school hip-hop which largely relied on MCs with swing in their flow, and at times relied on sampled swing jazz. Many sorts of music "swing". Certain two step even could be said to have "swung" house music.

i think s.r. was saying that the phrase "swingin" or "that swings" does not = "swell" or "righteous" anymore, it's descriptive of a particular sound. "that rocks" has taken over as musical synonym for "cool" these days and as the sound of rock - guitar riffs, blues structures, etc. - becomes more of a niche category so may the meaning of "rockin!" -- so if genre follows slang usage, as the argument above implies, guitar rock itself will become a specialty appreciated by connoisseurs and not the lingua franca of the culture.

B-but, I've had many friends describe, for example, a "swinging party" and of course the term "swinger" emerged far past the heyday of swing music. A party which swings and a party which rocks seem to be two distinct categories. I think only vocab-impaired teens undiscriminatingly use the label "rocks". Everyone else uses the term appropriately, and to some extent divorced from the musical context. How else, for example, could rap feature MCs who "rock the mic"?

a genre is dead as soon as its defenders constantly insist its not dead. if it was alive, nobody would feel the need to do this.

PUNK WILL NEVER DIE

What is the techno equivalent to "that rocks" or "that swings" ?

banging...

whhoaaahhh...

nice tune, sir...

Jungle has better ones:

rincin'

tearin'

bad muthafucka

I'd like to see "bad muthafucka" become a purely technical term.

rrrroller!

It was "kickin" the last time I went to a rave.

which was 10 years ago.

is bangin' the new kickin' or do they co-exist?

Motherfucker is a technical term in jazz these days, sure. Excerpt from my jazz ensemble class, professor to student:

"You're getting to be a monster player. Do you know what that is?"

"It's another term for motherfucker."

"That's correct."

I think genres do have sell-by dates. For instance, the neo-retro lounge thing of the mid 90s is dead, Shibuya-kei is dead. But with a bit of spin you can extend their lifespan, or allow for rejuvenating evolution into something else. Hence Jungle becomes Drum'n'bass, Easy Listening becomes Loungecore becomes Clubpop (copyright Bungalow Records) becomes Avant Pop (for more on the latter, which is lounge culture meeting research and incredibly strange music, check my ever-spinning website.)

By the way, although I hate to hear musicians whingeing about getting 'put in boxes', I do get frustrated by the seemingly-arbitrary plethora of genre terms flowing from the pens of inventive critics and enthusiastic curators.

For instance, Other Music drives me crazy. I can never decide if the record I want is in 'In' or 'Out' or 'La Decadanse' or 'Electronica' or 'Krautrock' or whatever (my ideal record is *all* the above!). So I think everything should either be alphabetical (which would have the advantage of erasing the invisible racial divides which genres like 'Rock/Pop' and 'Soul/Dance/Rap' entrench) or every artist should invent their own genre. Hence my Analog Baroque, Fake Folk, Unpop, etc.

PS: Would anyone agree that Genrefuck has become, itself, a genre?

well duh, as said in every 'midnite vultures' review.

Good. So nobody's going to look at me funny when I go into Tower Records and say 'Can you direct me to the Genrefuck section, please?'

The Tower at Piccadilly is one big Genrefuck section. I restate: "Goth/Ethereal/Industrial/EBM..." This is one step away from throwing yr hands in the air and throwing all yr wares in a big heap in the middle of the floor....

(EBM = Electronic Body Music, I *think*)

If only record stores would alphabetize everything all together, or at most in just two or three large categories! Or maybe we need some sort of Dewey-Decimal or Library of Congress system of cataloguing music in shops. Nowadays it takes me five times as long to find the CD I'm looking for as it used to. Example: Brigitte Fontaine. I was looking for her in a large store the other day, but was back and forth across the tiles like a rat in a maze. (No good asking a clerk, since invariably they give wrong directions.) Was she in French? World? Jazz? Rock? Imports? Indie? Easy Listening? Even Contemporary Classical? I gave up and settled for more Juliette Greco I found in "French."

The duration of an art-historical style ought to be considered as the length of time during which it is a leading and dominating style, the time during which it is the vessel of the largest part of the important art being produced in a given medium within a given cultural orbit. This is also, usually, the time during which it attracts those younger artists who are most highly and seriously ambitious...

All art styles deteriorate and, in doing so, become usable for hollow and meretricious effects.
Clement Greenberg Avant Garde Attitudes, 1968

Somebody was trying to sell me a "Braindance" record the other day. Let me be the first to say: Braindance will never die!!!!!

Some do. I mean, rap won't last ten years from now. But I am living proof that good music lasts - I am 13 and my favourite music is 70s prog.

Don't worry...when you reach fourteen, you'll outgrow it.

Patronised by Lord Custos!! Blimey!

Anna, isn't it the case of your projecting your dislike of rap into your predictions - given that it's been around 25 years and has managed to become the most-listened-to genre on the planet (or close to it), hip-hop isn't likely to be going anywhere, or at least not within a decade. Since by your own example only one person need be listening to it for it to survive! (But I'm sure you still won't like it in a decade.)

when i was 16 we had a PUNK ROCK REVOLUTION and all the music anna likes was destroyed and banished forever!!

(25 yrs is pushing it, tom, isn't it?)

(I read an article the other day claiming THIRTY!!! OK 23 if we're talking as a recorded genre but it was around for a few years before that)

I can't believe you didn't make a Salt n Pepa joke.

Hey, don't give me this crap. My brother is 16, has been listening to prog for 8-9 years and loves it. What would I listen to without it? There's nothing STIMULATING in rap, anyway. It's boring. It sucks. You don't need a brain cell to do it. Play the drums and say "fuck" lotsa times real fast. Brain-stretching, man. Prog makes you think, that is if you can, you have to be relatively smart to listen to it. That's why it's not popular. IT WILL NEVER DIE, however. I'll listen to it as long as I live, and in all my next lives. Don't be a bunch of rap-loving schmucks. Please.

Blimey Anna read what you're replying to eh? I'm not saying rap is great and prog is rubbish (though as it happens I like rap lots more), I'm saying that it's very unlikely that rap will disappear within the next ten years whether or not you like it, just as prog has plainly not disappeared despite shovelfuls of hatred heaped upon it.

Prog Rock is for arty farty Students or old geezers. You're just a faux anomaly, Anna. ;-)

I listened to two rap albums at the weekend, and nobody said fuck once. (One of them said "Putain" a lot tho'.) I am demanding my money back!

Did they say FEK cause that's like worse?

Anna, for someone who doesn't listen to rap you'd do quite well on the Nas vs Jay-Z throwdown thread.

(I listened to Marillion when I was 13)

Nothing makes me think more than a good stretch listening to Yes. I think "God, Rick Wakeman's a cunt".

Geez, chill out. What's everyone's problem? I'm just defending my extremely good music, I'm not killing anyone. Dom, Yes is a VERY GOOD BAND. (Gotta talk as though to an idiot.)

I'm just defending my extremely good music, I'm not killing anyone.

You're trying to kill a genre by force of your individual hatred, though, which is laughable, bluntly put -- it's a force bigger than you'll ever be. And before you have a snit fit, take a deep breath and reread -- as Tom noted, prog has had more than enough hate dumped and projected on it, and here you are loving it. The fact that you love it doesn't determine a universal standard any more than your claim that hip-hop will die out within ten years does. Plenty of people were dismissing rock and roll in the fifties in the same outraged tones you're using here about hip-hop, but that didn't happen -- and you should be plenty glad of it, since otherwise all the music you especially love would never have come to pass. ;-)

The more you'll hang around these boards, the more you'll see I adhere to a position of what I call radical subjectivity -- in otherwards, that when you listen to music, what matters is your opinion and yours alone when it comes to good music or bad, not what your friends or critics or anyone else will say. Obviously you believe in that already, because you're sticking to liking something nobody else in your own social circle even wants to give the time of day to, and that's a very cool thing. Likewise, if rap isn't your thing, that's fine -- I personally don't believe that whole genres should ever be dismissed out of hand, but there's no point in forcing somebody to like something, of course. But then you encounter people who love what they happen to love with their own fierce passion much the same you do, and you're not crediting them for that, you're not allowing for that fact in the slightest. Trying to tell us not to be a bunch of 'rap-loving schmucks' is pointless. There are people on these boards who love and adore bands and musicians I despise and just can't stand -- but I don't question their love of them, and indeed from listening to them talk about why they enjoy what they do, I get different perspectives I might not otherwise have, even while making my own point of view clear. I may not be arguing perfectly all the time, but I'm not coming in with broad statements about how this kind of music rules while that kind of music sucks and then wondering why people get mad. ;-)

Most of the people arguing with you Anna are arguing with you cos they like you (or like the idea of a mouthy teenage prog rock fan anyway). If they didn't like you they'd be ignoring you.

If you turn up on a board and say something sucks you will probably be challenged on it. It's nothing personal. If someone turned up saying prog rock was all "boring wank" then assuming anybody could be bothered they'd get called on it too (it's happened already on some threads!).

But Ned, what if they like Rage Against The Machine?!?!?

then they are rap-loving schmucks, tim

speaking of which, where *is* the coolest person on the interweb apart from anna?

i'm right here, mark...

then they are rap-loving schmucks, tim

Woohoo!

Jordan likes Rage and I like him, so all is well, see. :-)

nothing stimulating?!?

Play the drums and say "fuck" lotsa times real fast.

Wasn't that a form of meditation invented by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?

Play the drums

christ, no one tell her they're not actually playing those drums or she'll really hate it!

You guys are all freaks. It's nice to know I'm not alone in the world.