As real music writing becomes a dying art, the internet is spawning a need for records to be over defined, creating ridiculous genre names, writes DONALD CLARKE
WHEN DID music appreciation become a branch of entomology? Back in the olden days, when attempting to describe the sound made by, say, Joy Division, your average music writer would gaily ram together Nietzsche quotes with Camus off-cuts to produce tiny masterpieces of creative obfuscation. "By dressing its weltzmerz in shop-worn dialecticism, Unknown Pleasuresuncovers new continents of protean recursion." That sort of thing. Nobody knew what it meant, but, while counting the days before the record arrived in the shop, the reader could roll the text round his tongue and try to draw some slight hints of the flavours to come.
You will, of course, still get proper music writing in organs such as this fine newspaper. Out there on the internet, however, pop chat has been completely overwhelmed by the need to place every record within the tiniest available box. Consider some of the acts currently entertaining punters at the Glastonbury Music Festival.
Wild Beasts are playing on the John Peel stage. Have you heard the promising Cumbrian group? Well, they make a nervy noise that dances elegantly between melodic anxiety and curled aggression without fully committing to either competing manifesto. If this were 1984 and I were employed by The Face, I might say they danced the crypto-Spenglerian mambo or that they forced Maoist electricity from... Hey, where's everybody going?
Clued-in websites such as Pitchfork or Cokemachineglow largely dispense with such flourishes for a rigorous cataloguing of all the genres to which the current band apparently belongs. Here’s where the analogy with entomology comes in. One imagines the writers counting each verse’s legs and measuring each chorus’s thorax as they attempt to discern the correct genus and species.
The results, rather than being peer-reviewed in Naturemagazine, are then placed on Wikipedia. Wild Beasts, since you ask, belong to the following genres: "indie rock, art rock, baroque pop, dream pop, post-punk revival". There is now no need to write any more.
If you are wandering aimlessly about Glasto, a glance at your iPhone will help you avoid encounters with any particularly unlovely schools of music.
Do you have little time for “anti-folk“? Well stay away from Florence and the Machine then. Wikipedia tells us that the flame-haired shriekist also exhibits “indie pop, indie rock, baroque pop and alternative rock” tendencies.
And you thought that “indie” and “alternative” meant the same thing. Ha!
Next you’ll be telling me that you think goregrind, deathgrind and blackened death metal groups all make vaguely similar noises. Moron!
Vampire Weekend are wordbeat, indie rock, Upper West Side Soweto and – it’s back again – baroque pop. Groove Armada’s music covers a full six genres: big beat, electronica, house, trip hop, downtempo and synthpop. The bombastic Muse play, among other things, space rock. The camp Scissor Sisters take in electroclash.
Once upon a time, back when the sight of Iggy Pop’s penis was still an amusing novelty, rock music was rumoured to be a vaguely counter-cultural activity. Rejecting the mainstream ethos involved pretending – come on, we knew it was a pose – to avoid any easy categorisation or commodification.
The British version of punk was at its most pungent in the chaotic months before it coalesced into an easily digestible movement. The brand of music played by faux-rebels such as Green Day or Blink 182 has as much to do with that early anti-culture as did the prog noodling that preceded it. To put it another way, if a band calls itself “Punk Rawk” you can be sure it’s nothing of the sort.
The marketing wonks’ need to isolate target audiences caused rock music to become increasingly Balkanised in the 1980s and 1990s. But the final unstoppable acceleration towards genre promiscuity is inextricably tied up with the rise of digital downloading. Think about it. In the time it takes to read the first sentence of a Paul Morley album review from the 1980s — or one gigasyllabic word from a Greil Marcus piece — you can call up the iTunes Store and enjoy a few sample melodies. Morley or Marcus will just be getting into their post-Jungian stride when the last tune from the album begins nestling itself into your playlist.
It is, thus, imperative that contemporary advice be offered in a few instantly accessible syllables. Give me more baroque pop, mister. Where’s my math rock? I want more pornogrind. (Please note: none of these terms is made-up.)
So, what can be done to stop this obscenity? How do we restore the paragraph’s ascendency over the glib hyphenate? Maybe we don’t have to.
Genre proliferation is preceding at such a rate that, within a year or so, there will be as many categories of music as there will be bands. We may need to recall the lengthy adjectives and overblown analogies simply to explain what we mean by pilchard-funk, sandwichcore or horse-thief’s ragtime. Pop entomology will eat itself.
