Since I’m still getting back into blogging and the practice of writing, again, I thought my next post would be more broad. I mean, I told my one good story, already, so I guess the next thing to do is wax philosophically.
As previously established, I’m clearly and forever a Rock-and-Roller. It was my first true musical love and will forever dominate my listening identity. But if you’ve seen my #tenrandomlistens posts, you know that my tastes are far broader than that. I hold no artificial limitations on, nor nostalgia for, any particular time-period and few limitations on style. My only interest is in what moves me.
While there are certainly styles of music with which I do not connect, or have no significant knowledge of, I have less and less interest “genre” as a concept. In fact, my feeling on the matter can be summed up as such, “Genre is like gender; a set of poorly defined categories used primarily to sell us things.” And this has become such a important sentiment to my approach to listening and exploring. Most of my favorite artists are those that are not easily identifiable as any particular genre, and that’s a big part of what makes them interesting.
Perhaps I don’t give people enough credit, but my assumption is that we’re handed a set of music from the culture of our youth that we are implicitly expected to claim as our own, and we stick with that music for our whole lives even if we stopped paying attention to new music at 30. If you’re one of the outliers who continue to seek out new music after 30 it would still likely be in line with the music of your youth culture. That’s a big part of how we define ourselves. We identify and segregate ourselves by genre the same way that we identify and segregate ourselves by political party. Like prefers like; birds of a feather, etc.
Ethically, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. If you cut your musical teeth listening to Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire in 1993, you probably are devoted to country music and nostalgic for those halcyon days of the 90s. And you’d have every reason to be. Country music exploded in those days because, in part, there was an influx of talent hitting at just the right time for mass appeal.
But as my musical journey began, first with Led Zeppelin and “classic” rock, then Tori Amos, then showtunes, then jazz, then folk, then…, then…, then…. I got to the point where I couldn’t listen to just one genre of music, at least not for very long. Conveniently, I can listen to one type of music for 1-2 hours, then I need to go on to something else. It’s convenient because it’s approximately the length of and album or two, or a concert. I can no longer be a person who keeps the radio on just one station from which it never deviates. I’ve actually not listened to traditional broadcast radio for upwards of two decades at this point. My last favorite radio station was 88.1 KDHX in St. Louis. A community radio station which changed format every two hours when the DJ changed.
When I first joined Threads, back in September 2023, I very quickly found myself in Music Threads connecting with a lot of musicians and enthusiasts like myself. I would see musicians openly struggling with how to describe their sound or even trying to stick within one, worrying about drifting into other areas. My completely unsolicited and unscientific advice to them was “don’t worry about it.” Genre is a construction, just like gender is. Your genre should be the last thing you should be thinking of as an artist. What you should be thinking about is making your art, regardless of what that sounds like. Let others worry about the genre.
This brings me to another point in my musical philosophy. All art has the same inherent value. A highly skilled artist’s work has the same inherent value as a poorly skilled artist’s. The same is true about art from well-known and unknown artists. It’s all the same at the moment of creation. The value is assigned to it when it reaches the consumer via commercialization or public performance. But at its core, at its initiation, it’s all the same.
These two ideas together: 1) genre is a capitalist construct, and 2) all art has the same inherent value; create an opportunity for those who embrace it to reject snobbery in all forms because there is literally no “right” music to like.
I spent a lot of years and a lot of money building the “best” media collection of music, movies, and books so that I could feel sophisticated and others would be impressed by my taste. This worked sometimes. I now like to joke that, “I have excellent taste in music. Everyone says so.” But, ultimately that’s an empty pursuit. It turns you sour. You find yourself talking yourself out of artists that give you pure joy, but aren’t “right” for your tastes. I did this to myself with Weird Al Yankovic and let others do it to me with Boston. Ya know what? Weird Al and Boston are fucking awesome, and I was stupid to put them down. I’ve purchased AC/DC’s BACK IN BLACK three times in my life for just this reason.* I love the record, but twice convinced myself that I was too sophisticated for it. Fortunately, the last time it stuck.
Snobbery also creates this idea of “guilty pleasures.” This notion that there are things we enjoy in our culture that we’re not supposed to enjoy (e.g. Weird Al and Boston). I did this with television in the form of THE GILMORE GIRLS. I love that show, and always did, but I would only watch it in secret on occasion, because I, a cis-het man, wasn’t supposed to like a show like that, and I certainly wasn’t the target audience. Again, do you see the gender-genre correlation?
There’s nothing wrong with liking Culture Club and Yes. Nothing wrong with liking Miles Davis and Lefty Frizzell. Nothing wrong with liking Phillip Glass and Hootie and The Blowfish. There’s no wrong way to do this, unless you’re not being authentic to what moves you.
Well, there is another wrong way to do this. It’s the core of snobbery itself. It’s thinking poorly of others who like things you don’t. All snobbery is bullying with an air of class. A couple of weeks ago I ran across someone on Threads who said something snotty about country music. I pressed her on what specifically she didn’t like about it, and all she could say was how much she didn’t like the people who listen to it. She didn’t like the people who enjoy the music BECAUSE they enjoy the music. I pressed her on this further and she blocked me to avoid having to deal with her actions and attitude.
I no longer think of Eddie Van Halen as one of the great rock guitarists of all time. I think he was kind of an idiot and a hack and people who’ve never played guitar are impressed with a bunch of finger tapping. But you know what? I’m not the arbiter of great rock guitarists. I just know what I like. If you still think EVH was great, that’s cool. We get to disagree. That’s what makes it art. We don’t get to use that disagreement as a value judgement of others.
Genre does have some virtue, it’s true. Primarily, it gives us a common language to relate what lane music falls in, but it doesn’t take long before that language breaks down and we get to arguing if something is really in that genre or not. Think of the talk about Beyonce’s COWBOY CARTER record (one I very much enjoyed, BTW) and if the record, or any individual track, is country. What this very quickly does is reveal the socio-political stance of the people making the argument.**
Genre is useful as a tool for description, but mostly it’s used as a category to divide us into easily marketable groups. And by being assigned to these groups we get limited in our cultural experience and literacy. One has to conscientiously break out of those groups to open up their experience. Once we do, though, the world becomes so much more colorful and deep. If you’ve not taken the journey yet, please, do. I think you’ll thank yourself.
*Incidently, I recently discovered that a large number of my CD have been disappeared, including AC/DC’s BACK IN BLACK. So, now I have to buy it a 4th time.
**The politics and sociology of genre may be a topic of a future post.
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