The love of genre

We seem to have developed an obsession with categories. In music (for I know about little else, I'm afraid) this roughly translates as an almost rabid obsession with genre.

If you happen to write or record music, one of the first questions you usually get asked is "What do you sound like?". Then begins the inherently negative process of genre selection. Musicians are encouraged to respond to this (both through reading interviews with proper bands and through the terrifying pages of musical self-help one finds all over this medium) by naming a genre or a list of other bands they sound like(or preferably three they sound like and one unfashionable one that they don't just to add that extra bite of eclectic chic) .

Call me a foolish old pedant if you will, but doesn't that negate the idea of novelty or originality before a note has even been played? It doesn't take much of a genius to notice that since the general theory that everything's already been done and a creative artist is only a sensitive magpie became the consensus, most mainstream music has turned into a glossy extended advert for whichever lifestyle subgroup that band happens to dress like.

Not that I'm denying the relevance on the sensitive magpie theory (often shovelled into the bag marked postmodernism), more just pointing out that such a mechanism does not particularly facilitate freedom of thought and exprssion - one of the things I always thought was a pretty large part of the point of creativty.

Comments

[jack]

Very nicely put. Whenever people ask me what Morissey's vocal style is like, I am all too often tempted to draw comparisons with the alien creatures in Galaxy Quest when in fact I really should just say "shit".

[Peter]

The trouble is that the 'negative' or reductive habit of putting everything new into a genrebox can swing it both ways for someone wanting to create something or express something ('do I dare?'). You're either too terrified to start because you don't know whether you've got it in you to create something worthwhile ('I am no prophet - and here's no great matter'); or you're stymied by the knowledge that whatever you do create will just be a blend or a collage of other people's ideas (and therefore futile).

On the other hand, the opposite of both is true: you're excited to know that whatever you create, good or bad, will be unique (and in some way therefore perfect) because of the time and place and context in which it is expressed; and you know that everyone else has started off sounding a bit like someone else.

I suppose my opinion is that the sensitive magpie approach can be a way to start - to get over the anxiety of self-expression, to beat the inertia of silence. It takes away some of the risk, and depersonalises the song, the story, the poem. I think I hope that having beaten that inertia, the sensitive magpie finds that actually he's created something that is more than just a combination of his influences. It's like life, innit: we're just a bundle of genes and experiences, but we're still uniquely us.

[Alexandra Mareike]

great joy being here..