Until the early 90s, there were only a handful of genre terms in usage. A dude played acoustic guitar and sang, you called him “Folk.” Donna Summer, w/ the sleek machine productions of Giorgio Moroder was called “Disco”, and so was the organic party outfit KC and the Sunshine Band. They sounded nothing alike, and yet “Disco” worked just fine.
Did the explosion of different genres really have anything to do with the music? Wasn’t music always inbreeding, mutating and so on, even before London pirate radio? What was lost in not having the all the terms back in those days?
I have a feeling the explosion of dance music genre classifications really came about as a way for DJs and clubs to market themselves, but I want to know what you think. How’d it happen, why did it happen, and are we the better for it, in a nutshell.
― Mark, Thursday, 16 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
I lay the blame squarely on the music industry's increased tendency towards niche-marketing and demographics, plain and simple. Create these artifical distinctions and subcultures, encourage ridiculously insular definitions of "cool" and you have more people fighting over who's hip and whose not and spending millions of dollars in the process. Total bullshit.
― Shaky Mo Collier, Thursday, 16 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
The thing is, this hair-splitting of genres defies reason - it even defies listening, as its often impossible to single out the minute differences between one "style" or another, even for someone deeply familiar with the music's evolution. The motivation behind these sort of distinctions bears almost no connection to anything aesthetic, it's motivated almost entirely by a marketing philosophy.
― Sterling Clover, Thursday, 16 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
"What does he/she spin?""_________"
― nabisco%%, Thursday, 16 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
The same must happens now, with all the differing music mags (particularly dance, though indie music press can be as bad), keen to spot the next scene so they can plaster it all over the cover in the hope of selling more copies (NMEs Emo cover, Sleaze Nation's Electroclash cover). I would have thought there are more music mags/web-sites/tv stations/radio stations, keen to genrify now.
― mfreake@iii.co.uk, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
It's partially a case of natural selection though, isn't it? I was reading a copy of The Face from the eighties the other day and came across quite a few casual references to genres that we wouldn't even recognise today. I like "neurofunk" but similarly I imagine even dance fans in ten years will have no idea what it is. The big ones will survive, and the rest will be resubsumed within the broader tags.
― Tim, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
Is this necessarily the logic behind it? I wonder whether inventing a new 'scene' as the NME is always accused of doing would actually help sell more copies than putting the old familiars back on the cover: eg. will a Miss Kitten cover sell more copies than an Oasis cover? (There are probably factual answers to this.) Although I suppose it might be different with the Dance music press; but then I always get the impression that part of their selling point is their claim to be down with the latest thing.
But I feel it might be more to do with having to sell to your riders a sense of being on the 'inside': and as popular music becomes (arguably) more differentiated and heterogeneous it becomes harder and harder to keep up. The proliferation of generic labels partly reflects the need of micro-groupings within scenes to articulate their identities and partly testifies to the difficulty of pinning down those scenes from the outside. Every time you think you've got a handle on it, it's mutated again, damn it :-)
So maybe that's a two-way answer to the original question, that it happens from above, and from below.
― alext, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
Perhaps the new genrification was about focussing music. House nights had to supply hours of house, ditto jungle. The finer distinctions of the new vocabulary meant people could demarcate and refer to more tightly defined musical styles. That meant record producers didn't go off-message with variant rhythms or moods. And DJs could find continuous stream of new but very similar tracks.
― phil, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
― Lord Custos 2.0 beta, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
― Andy K, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
want it, want it
Actually shouldn't someone go away and write a genre-name generating perl-script at this point ... oh god, don't let it be me!
I certainly doubt that it's all about marketing - look how keen every single record label is not to get pigeonholed too much. They all know that microgenres have a lifespan of 2-3 years and that they definitely don't want to be stereotyped as (say) techstep at a time when that style is unsellable.
It's a general 90s 00s media proliferation effect. It's happening to books, films and comics to name only a few. There's so much more of everything now that we need genre shorthands to break it down into manageable chunks.
Genre is actually a prerequisite to finding interesting music in many ways. It is easy enough to build up a 'canonical' record collection from reading music criticism, but to dig deeper you nearly always have to dive into a genre - it's simply impossible to browse the whole of Audiogalaxy or HMV - you need to take them section by section and browse all the house first, then the garage etc. Then you realise that your local specialist retailer has so much more house, but there you have to go through all the chicago house, then the jazzy house etc. etc.
It's simple mechanics...
― jacob, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
― dyson, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
Musical Hairsplitting: The act of classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: "The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska."
― Dom Passantino, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)
― Mark, Friday, 17 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)