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hey, welcome to 12tone! a while back, I made a video about The Trooper, by Iron Maiden,
and I got a lot of comments objecting to the fact that, when listing important bands from
the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, I included Def Leppard.
now, I largely ignored these complaints because, well, I was right, but it got me thinking
about what genres are, how we use them, and why I kinda wish we'd use them differently.
but before we get into that, we need to talk about what genres actually are.
most obviously, they're a set of compositional practices.
like, if I tell you a song is two minutes long at 240 beats per minute and it features
distorted electric guitars playing the same three power chords over and over, you might
guess that I'm describing a punk song, whereas if instead I tell you it's got a repeating
32-bar form, lots of complex, colorful harmonies, and a swung rhythmic feel, you might guess
it was… another punk song.
I mean, you'd be wrong, it's probably jazz, but hey, I can't stop you from guessing.
the point is, when we talk about a piece of music fitting into a specific genre, that
usually means that it has certain musical elements that reflect the sound of that genre.
this obviously isn't a strict list: not all punk songs are short, for instance, and not
all jazz songs are swung.
but the more of those ideas the song incorporates, the more it's going to feel like a part of
that group.
but a genre is more than that: it's also a culture.
when I say "punk", you don't just think fast songs and power chords, you think ripped clothes,
spiky hair, and body piercings.
the genre evokes not just a particular sound, but a particular sort of person.
genres provide a sense of community, allowing people who like similar sorts of music to
connect with each other and form deeper bonds.
in this sense, the music serves less as a form of entertainment and more as a kind of
entry code: liking it shows that you're the sort of person who belongs with that crowd.
and finally, a genre is also a set of stories, people, and events.
that is, it's a history.
rock music, for instance, is Elvis Presley, it's Jimi Hendrix's performance of the Star-Spangled
Banner, and it's the rise of grunge in the 90s. these are all a part of the story of
rock.
this sort of historical view winds up showing connections that might not be apparent through
other means.
like, does Presley's music actually sound much like what we consider rock today?
I'd argue that it doesn't, but not because it's unrelated: it's just that we've had over
60 years to develop the style.
so yeah, when we talk about genres, we're really talking about three different things:
a set of compositional practices, a culture, and a history.
and my problem isn't that any of these don't matter.
as a music theorist I tend to focus more on compositional practice, but that's just personal
preference: I have nothing but respect for the musicologists and music historians who
work with other facets. and my problem isn't even that we view these three things collectively:
they're very clearly related.
compositional practice reflects the values of the musical culture it's written in, and
that musical culture is shaped by its history.
we absolutely should be viewing these as three pieces of the same puzzle: my problem is that
we don't seem to realize we're doing that.
we blend them all together into one single, inextricable object, and we often apply that
object without any consideration for context.
like, let's go back to the Def Leppard example.
if you read any good history of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, you'll see that, at
the time, they were considered important members of the movement.
and that's not a mistake: early Def Leppard stuff sounds a lot like the music of other
contemporary heavy metal bands.
like, look up Wasted, the first single off their debut album On Through The Night, and
tell me it doesn't sound like an Iron Maiden song.
so if they were so clearly a part of the movement, both historically and musically, why is acknowledging
that so controversial?
well, it's because as time went on, their style changed.
while Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and others leaned further and further into that heavy
metal sound, Def Leppard took a different route and became pioneers of a genre called
glam metal, which made them a lot of money in the 80s, but in the decades since, glam
has become somewhat of a punchline in many corners of the metal community, and Def Leppard
are kind of its poster children.
this makes them, in a sense, almost like cultural traitors: the image we have of them today
doesn't fit with the cultural values that modern metalheads ascribe to the New Wave
of British Heavy Metal, and since we don't accept them culturally, it's hard to imagine
that they might have a historical place within that pantheon.
because we don't have the language to differentiate between those two viewpoints, we don't know
how to handle it when they disagree.
but if people incorrectly yelling at me in my comments section was the worst thing that
genres caused, I wouldn't have bothered making this video.
I mean, that happens all the time anyway, and this isn't gonna change much.
no, I'm talking about this because I think it's indicative of a much deeper problem.
basically, we have a habit of codifying genres, making up hard rules that define what does
and doesn't count and putting up imaginary barriers between different kinds of music.
effectively, this means separating the genre from its history, defining an idealized form
and denying it the capacity to adapt and evolve. for instance, back in 2014, the Grammy for
Best Rock Performance was won by Imagine Dragons for their song Radioactive, and a lot of my
friends were pissed.
they argued that Imagine Dragons wasn't a "real" rock band, and giving them the prize
over other nominees like Led Zeppelin or Queens Of The Stone Age was more than just wrong,
it was disrespectful to the genre.
but what does it mean to be rock?
I mean, this is a genre that stretches from Elvis to Audioslave.
it's a genre that's had over 60 years of evolution, and it's gone through so many different forms
in that time that nailing down any uniquely identifying characteristics is almost impossible.
but for many people, the concept of rock is defined not by that entire history, but by
the sound and culture of their favorite era.
the stuff before that usually gets grandfathered in, but everything after that point, whenever
it is, doesn't really count.
but in reality, rock has a long history full of innovation and change: why can't Imagine
Dragons be part of the next chapter?
codification can also cause problems in the other direction, when we apply it to increasingly
narrow categories, creating more and more niche subgenres.
this happens a lot in one of my favorite styles, metal: there's a link in the description to
the wikipedia page of metal subgenres, which lists 27 distinct categories, many of which
have their own sub-subgenres. for instance, death metal alone has spawned blackened death,
melodeath, techdeath, symphonic death, and something called death n' roll.
now, are these styles actually different?
yes.
each one has its own compositional practices, and a listener who's familiar with those distinctions
could easily tell one from another.
but do those differences… matter?
that's a harder question to answer.
like, clearly they can be important to people, and they're definitely useful for recommending
new music.
for example, if I like Amon Amarth, I'm more likely to enjoy other melodeath bands like
Children of Bodom, as opposed to a black metal band like Behemoth.
but personally, I like all three, and I doubt I'm the only one, which brings me to my main
point: I think these genres are vastly overspecified. by inventing a new subgenre every time the
compositional practices of the music change a little bit, we wind up separating that music
from its cultural and historical context.
we lose sight of all the similarities because we're too focused on the differences.
this may not seem like a big deal, but I think it can create huge artificial limitations
for composers.
I've known plenty of songwriters whose first thought when starting on a new piece is how
to make it fit within a specific genre. and this isn't bad: if you're, say, writing the
score for a movie scene set in a jazz club, you probably want to follow the compositional
practices of traditional jazz music.
but if your goal is just artistic expression, then it's important to remember that compositional
practices are shaped by cultural values, so if we don't understand why something is a
part of the practice then we don't understand how to use it.
like, take this chord. is it jazz?
I mean, it's got a bunch of fancy extensions on it, like jazz chords tend to, but I can't
just drop it into whatever song I'm writing and call it a jazz song, because these chords
aren't there for no reason.
jazz chords exist because jazz culture values clever improvisation, and complex harmonies
provide a challenge to newcomers as well as a road map to experienced improvisers so they
don't wind up playing the same basic solo over every set of changes.
that's part of it, anyway, but this isn't really a video on the history of jazz chords:
what matters is that making a song really sound like jazz requires you to know not just
which tools jazz players use, but how and why they use them.
and once you know what the actual goal is, you give yourself access to lots of new solutions
that you'd never have thought of if you were just copying stylistic conventions without
really thinking about where they came from.
which brings us to the question of borrowing from other genres.
there's certainly nothing inherently wrong with this, and a lot of great music has been
made by combining and reinterpreting elements from other styles, but it's important to remember
that genres exist as part of a culture, which means they can be intensely personal to the
people who create them, and we need to recognize that not all cultures want to share their
musical practices.
this is especially relevant when that music is made by marginalized groups who may not
be able to effectively capitalize on their own work due to societal prejudice. in those
cases, swooping in from the outside to take their innovations, repackage them with a more
advertiser-friendly face, and sell them to a mainstream audience without permission and
without crediting or paying back the community is not only disrespectful, it also means fundamentally
missing out on the culture and history that make that genre work in the first place.
don't get me wrong: cultural exchange is great, and it's a huge part of how artistic cultures
grow, but it's not an exchange if only one side agreed to it.
this isn't really a composition question, though: it's about societal power structures,
so if you want more detail I've linked to a fantastic video from The1Janitor about it
in the description.
I highly recommend you check it out.
anyway, to be honest, when I started thinking about making this video a year ago, my goal
was to convince you that genres were largely pointless, but the more I thought about it,
the less I came to believe that they actually were.
I think genres have a place in the way we talk about music, I just don't think that
place is the one they currently occupy.
using genres to examine how certain compositional techniques connect and behave within a broader
cultural and historical landscape is great.
using genres to put up clear dividing lines and then fighting about which musical objects
belong on which side is not great.
and my problem with genres is just that we seem to be way more interested in doing that
second thing.
like, way more.
it's ridiculous.
just stop.
stop it.
stop.
stooooop.
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as you probably guessed, it's about songwriting for EDM, or electronic dance music, which
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