On the meaninglessness of music genre

cd baby music genres 2012 screenshot

By Erika Meyer

When you do a DIY release of original music, especially if you release it digitally, one of the first things you will have to do is pick a genre. Every distribution service demands this. You are usually provided a list of acceptable choices (and they’re never the same from site to site), and sometimes you can select from a list of sub-genres as well. Having to choose a single genre for your music, or worse, for your whole catalog, can feel like an indignity. Like most musicians, I don’t think that my music should fit, snugly, into a single category. “Get over yourself, quit acting special, and pick a genre,” the how-to-succeed-in-the-music-industry experts oh-so-professionally advise.

I try.

Bukowski - Don't Try

Lately I lean towards the broad category of “rock” (or “rock n’ roll”), choosing “garage”, “psychedelic”, or “swamp” as possible sub-genres, depending on the song or the album or my mood at any given moment. With past bands, I’d find myself waffling between two equally unsatisfactory options: “alternative” and “punk.” Sometimes “alternative” and “punk” are offered sub-categories of “rock”; other times they stand next to “rock” as separate genres. The independent artist has to work with the choices offered, and those choices vary wildly from website to website.

CD baby, the company which currently handles my digital distribution, has a genre called “metal/punk”. “Metal/Punk” is not a sub-category of “rock”; it stands alone. And it is not a single genre that mixes punk and metal; it’s just that whoever designed the CD Baby database didn’t think punk and metal were so different as to require separate categories.

How times change.

Indie? Pop? Rock? Metal? Punk?

I find the process of genre selection endlessly frustrating as it repeats itself through CD Baby, MySpace (never again), Soundcloud, and whatever will the next DIY distribution site d’jour. Options vary widely, but inevitably, the categories are too broad, or too narrow, or too confusing, or too new, or too dated, to weird, or not descriptive enough. To what, exactly, is ‘alternative’ alternative? Does ‘punk’ describe the conditions under which the music is made and distributed, or does it describe a musical community, or does it describe a type of sound?

To make matters worse, the definitions of many genres seem to differ from region to region and to change over time. Once upon a time, indie meant independent. Today ‘indie’ describes a musical aesthetic, a sound. As I recall, this is the same thing that happened with the word alternative. Pop, too, is derived from the term “popular music” but now seems to be a genre of its own. Things get more specific, and at the same time more confusing, when two genres are mashed together. How, exactly, is “psychedelic pop” different from “psychedelic rock”? And if that isn’t confusing enough, let’s attach prefixes like post-, pre- and proto- onto some the genres, or create genres tied to specific nations or cultures, like Krautrock, or J-Rock. At CD Baby, I always wondered why they had rock sub-genres called, for example “50s rock”, “60s rock”, and so on, up through “90s rock” (psst, CD Baby? The 90s were 13 years ago now). This music isn’t necessarily from the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc; it just has to have some kind of real or imagined similarity or relationship to rock music made during those decades, and assumes that any particular decade had a distinct identifiable ‘rock’ sound.

Genre labels, in all their big confusing mishmash, are ubiquitous in the modern music landscape.There are few if any objective criteria for defining any genre. We aren’t talking about the difference between a sonnet and a sestina, the difference between eight-bar blues and 12-bar blues, or even about the difference between ballet and modern dance. Rock may have begun as an amplified blues, but it’s become a much broader concept today — so broad, in fact, I’m not sure where it begins or ends. And punk started out as an approach to music and life, but somewhere along the line morphed into a specific style of music featuring loud distorted guitars playing eighth note power chords against aggressive vocals.

And I’m just supposed to accept all this and go with the flow?

NO.

Music is for uniting, genre is for dividing

Musical genre is useful for drawing lines between “us” and “them”. It may be useful for marketing, for criticism, for academic discourse, and for database sorting, but to define music by genre really does a disservice to those artists who strive for originality. The creative process is largely about joining together disparate influences and adding your own twist to the mix. Saxophonist Art Pepper claimed to see no distinction between classical and jazz music. Blondie moved from the New York punk scene into the pop market where they released rap and reggae-influenced hits. Songwriter Jan Terri veers from country to pop to rock and even “country rap” within a single album.

Should Green River have been forced to chose between ‘punk’, ‘metal’, ‘alternative’ or ‘grunge’ on a drop down menu? Should Matisse have been forced to tick a box reading ‘fauvist’?

(continues overleaf)

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2012 at 3:23 pm. It is filed under Erika Meyer and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

10 Responses to “On the meaninglessness of music genre”

  1. styg says:
    January 24, 2012 at 1:45 am

    I remember Gorillaz winning “Best Dance Act” at the MTV Europe Awards one year, for Damon and Jamie’s subsequent ‘what the fuck?’ bemusement at being considered a dance act. Erika, are artists allowed to select multiple genre tags, or different genres for different songs, or anything like that? If I Fell is obviously not Hey Bulldog, Straight To Hell is obviously not Clash City Rockers, but would iTunes try and tell consumers that every Beatles song is a pop song, and every Clash song is a punk song?

    (btw, in my experience genres are terrible for academics, as they constrain, rather arbitrarily as you described here, what you are/aren’t allowed to focus your research on)

  2. Tamsin Chapman says:
    January 24, 2012 at 5:47 am

    Genres always confuse and annoy me, so I remove all the genre tags from my mp3s as soon as I download them, and in my head I just call anything I like ‘pop’

  3. Daniel says:
    January 24, 2012 at 7:58 am

    I always chose other when using Tunecore or a Bandcamp if available. Unfortunately, when Tunecore distributes your music to Amazon, iTunes et al, an unseen, sentient force (God?)labels your music and undermines all of an artist’s efforts to appeal to a diverse audience.

    Erika’s totally right about how functioning outside of genre allows you to connect with lots of different fans and musicians, opening doors otherwise closed. That only works to a point. In my experience it costs a band signing opportunities, licensing and bookings too.

  4. Brimstone says:
    January 24, 2012 at 9:12 am

    “I remember Gorillaz winning “Best Dance Act” at the MTV Europe Awards one year, for Damon and Jamie’s subsequent ‘what the fuck?’ bemusement at being considered a dance act.”

    Huh? They are a dance act.

    I divide the world into dance/pop and rock. Or evil and good.

  5. Erika Meyer says:
    January 25, 2012 at 3:01 am

    @styg, someday someone should write a history of legal music distribution on the internet… there is no rhyme or reason, really. I think this all grew organically and haphazardly, just like so much on the web. I had to choose my genres with my primary distributor, CD Baby, and they’re little idiosyncratic system. I believe that when CD Baby started, they just distributed CDs. Eventually, they started distributing MP3s to iTunes, Napster, Spotify etc. Each of these organizations has their own database set up, their own way of doing things. Whatever I chose as a “genre” in CD Baby’s little system (who’s genre categories appears to not have been updated in a decade) is not necessarily what populates through to iTunes, who has a different system. Some offer you more than one (maybe 2, rarely 3) options. Other sites, usually the more user-controlled ones (SoundCloud and BandCamp I *believe*) handle genres with TAGS (key words) rather than database categories. That gives you more freedom to play, but you have to anticipate your audience too, asking yourself “what key word or tag will someone realistically search for (or browse) that should lead them to my music?” The complexity of all of this is pretty astounding… it really comes down to, “how can I help people who will potentially LOVE my music, FIND my music?”

  6. Erika Meyer says:
    January 25, 2012 at 3:11 am

    “…functioning outside of genre allows you to connect with lots of different fans and musicians, opening doors otherwise closed. That only works to a point. In my experience it costs a band signing opportunities, licensing and bookings too.”

    @Daniel, That’s a good point, and it goes not just for music but so many art forms. Unfortunately, it appears you can do a lot as an artist to break new ground and connect with, even astonish, an audience, that somehow makes you poison to the industry itself. Obviously it’s a lot easier to package something that you can label with a single word, or to push something out into a market that already exists.

  7. Mark Zian says:
    January 25, 2012 at 8:25 am

    It seems to me that the problem is a lot bigger than genre defining. It’s lanuage, people have different interpretations of so many words and these meanings seem to change over time. Lanuage is not a perfect form of communicating anything let alone defining an artists output. Unfortunately it is all we have and just have to accept it.

    Maybe in terms of music we could use actual discriptive words rather than genre names. For example soft, loud, dissonant or dynamic. But then people would be unhappy with these and the arguments would continue.

    On the topic of being an artist and trying to define yourself, I have always found this one interesting, everybody seems to think that the’re unique. They never really quite fit in anywhere, high school, work, social sects or musical genres. This attitude of nobody gets me seems to run through most artists. Myself included.

    I have a friend with red hair and one day we were questioned by police and the police asked for his hair colour and he said strawberry blonde.

    Maybe we should all stop chasing our tales and just make music.

  8. Erika says:
    January 26, 2012 at 2:42 am

    @Mark Wow, I absolutely agree: “we should all stop chasing our tales and just make music.”

    On the other hand I am a “non-target-demographic” individual making rock n’ roll music and determined to take it as far as I can. The record labels are not exactly beating down our door. So I not only have to make the music, but to get the music heard without investment money, no outside label, very few industry connections. So like the rest, I am helping to steer not just a band, but a DIY label.

    Sometimes I think about writing an essay or book called “The Dark Side of D.I.Y.”

    I:

    write songs
    learn parts to songs
    transport and maintain gear
    book shows, play shows
    create and mail out press kits
    write and send press releases
    research and mail CDs/LPs for review
    solicit radio play (internet and otherwise)
    attempt (usually unsuccesfully) to book and fund tours
    deal with band drama and legal issues
    fund, record, release albums
    maintain websites
    make music videos

    and so on.

    Those of us who’s art isn’t seen as marketable will either play the corner bar forever, or work very hard to be heard by a larger audience. “Genre” is one of many things that can work for, or against us, in that larger market.

    But really, what initially inspired this piece, was confusion at how CB writers (who span the globe) perceive genre.

  9. Mark Zian says:
    January 26, 2012 at 9:58 pm

    Yeah I totally get your point and enjoyed the post. I have been getting quite annoyed with how people perceive genre aswell. Which makes it interesting that you bring up “D.I.Y”. I feel like DIY is starting to be used as quasi-genre rather than just an ethic.

    In my city, I feel like that the D in DIY is starting to stand for deadshit and used to describe a loner, outsider or downtrodden style of writing or sound. But for me, even if Brittany Spears was completing your above list herself she would be DIY.

    I find the concept of DIY labels funny. I self release my albums, so I understand your pain, but it seems to me that there are these DIY labels popping up, where the label does everything and the bands just rock up to shows, doesn’t sound very DIY to me.

    After that tangent back to the genre question. I agree it is hard and can work for and against bands especially when some people see certain genres as dirty words like ‘country’. But if you find a better solution please let me know, as I don’t have the labels or listeners beating down by door either.

  10. Shaun says:
    February 19, 2012 at 9:46 am

    Just getting back into creating music and software has changed loads. I’ve been in bands and play guitars too. On learning tutorials they all seem to be of the essence of “a drum base tutorial”, “R&B Tutorial”, “trance Tutorial”. I can’t stand this, it’s almost as is if everythings bucketed into standard practice of doing stuff. I do lots of standard practice at work building software. When it comes to creating music what ever happened to making something of your own? I want my music to sound like it does in my head before I’ve made it. I don’t want to set out to deliberately create a specific genre track, surely that’s just going to limit your creativity? Also I’ve never purchased music based on Genre, I bought it because it sounded good and was original.

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