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Genres


ca_gere

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Guest Young Adolesent

i like most people my music depends on my mood if im in a shit mood ill listen to stuff like  bon iver, the script some ed sheeran even some bb king  but when im in a great mood its mostly two door cinema club, biffy clyro, ed sheeran and more up beat music but im open to all genres but im more pop music yet i still listen to older like oasis, the beatles, pink floyd and sometimes van morrison

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Genres - needed they may be (if only to help categorise stuff in the record shop),  but I believe that the plethora of genres, sub-genres, combinations of genres and the paper-thin differences between some of them exist to fluff the egos of those who believe themselves to be in that genre and to generate false feelings of superiority and exclusivity.

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Genres - needed they may be (if only to help categorise stuff in the record shop), but I believe that the plethora of genres, sub-genres, combinations of genres and the paper-thin differences between some of them exist to fluff the egos of those who believe themselves to be in that genre and to generate false feelings of superiority and exclusivity.

Give me an example of a band that falls into this category.

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Give me an example of a band that falls into this category.

 

Please forgive my previous snappiness.  It's not the bands I have a beef with, it's the plethora of genres in general.  The granularity of the dataset is such that the differences between the individual genres are getting so small that the originality criteria required to instigate a new genre is becoming more and more tenuous.  

 

It's just an opinion/suspicion that people start new genres because they wish to disassociate themselves from previous genres, scenes or whatever.  Form new gangs/tribes/cliques.  I really don't care about that kind of stuff.

 

I find the prefixing of genres with "post" to be the height of arrogance.  So you represent the new and evolved form of an existing genre do you?  So much so that it's noteworthy in its own right?  Why?  Says who?

 

And suffixing genres with -core is as stupid as suffixing scandals with -gate.  It was funny the first time, maybe.

 

Ach, I should shut up.  I think it's just me getting old.  Ten years from now I probably won't be listening to music at all and grumping and grizzling about the noise that youngsters make these days.  I'm sorry I dumped all this negativity towards genres in your thread which I'm guessing was meant to celebrate and discuss genres.

 

:(

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We class ourselves as post music, we're the next stage of audible evolution.

 

Seriously tho, this all comes back to the "what is punk" debate, its shite really. Music is music, genre's just seem to be there so you can be pigeonholed into a bracket easily. Bands spend half their life worrying about what genre they fit into, or making sure the next song they write fits into the last songs "grove", i just find it stale sometimes, just write a fucking song, play it, and live with it, dont worry if the crabcore crew are going to want to form a wall of death to your next 4 chord ditty. 

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Using things like 'dance' or 'metal' seems very limiting to me - each of those umbrella genres contain a great spectrum of styles and I'd rather there were accepted terms to differentiate between them than not. I accept that having those terms can be a limiting factor for some people - the 'we like sub-genre, what you have done is not true sub-genre therefore we will not accept you or your music' types - and that the names themselves are often ridiculous and not especially descriptive but that doesn't mean they're useless and the fact that some folk can't cope doesn't mean we should all cave in and ignore that there's more going on than these broad strokes suggest.

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But what is the big difference, say between, 'post rock', 'post hardcore' or just rock music? It just seems a bit wanky to me at times. 

 

If someone asks me what my band is like, i just tell them its a rock band, i dont need to be any more specific than that, because anything more specific is just limiting the people i can hopefully reach. 

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But what is the big difference, say between, 'post rock', 'post hardcore' or just rock music? It just seems a bit wanky to me at times. 

 

If someone asks me what my band is like, i just tell them its a rock band, i dont need to be any more specific than that, because anything more specific is just limiting the people i can hopefully reach. 

I think sometimes having a sub genre within the rock umbrella can sometimes help. For instance, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Dead Meadow could be both described as rock bands:

 

 

 

I don't think that either really share that much musically, but if I describe Godspeed as post rock and Dead Meadow as psych rock, you'll have a pretty good idea what you are getting yourself into.

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But what is the big difference, say between, 'post rock', 'post hardcore' or just rock music? It just seems a bit wanky to me at times. 

 

If someone asks me what my band is like, i just tell them its a rock band, i dont need to be any more specific than that, because anything more specific is just limiting the people i can hopefully reach. 

 

There isn't a difference between post hardcore and rock music but that doesn't mean that all rock music is post hardcore. You can tailor how you describe bands based on your audience. If I'm at work and someone asks me what kind of music my band plays I'm probably just going to say 'rock music with guitars 'n' that' because I know they don't know/care about what makes Weezer different from Mumford & Sons or whatever it is they like.

 

To me 'rock' isn't a particularly useful term - sure it lets me know that there's going to be guitars 'n' that but outside of that I'll still be clueless. I don't see why it should be considered self indulgent to accept that not all music that fits that term sounds the same. I realise you've picked two genres with 'post' in them to make a point of how wanky it sounds to call anything 'post' something but unless you've never listened to anything from either I don't understand how you'd be unable to say they're different beasts.

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Its not so much i dont see the difference, i do in a way, i understand that you could call Slipknot and The Killers as rock bands, but both would be on hugely different ends of the scale of rock, but for the little subtle differences i dont see the need for a new genre.

 

Maybe its just my circle of friends, none of us could care what the difference is between post rock, or normal rock, or pre rock, we just see it as rock music, something heavy gets called metal, we dont tend to dig any deeper than that.  

 

BTW im not slagging anything that has 'post' at the start of it as a genre, or using it to look down on people who use it, by all accounts my band would come into the 'post rock' category, i just dont get hung up on these sub genre's. 

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That's fair enough - I'm not insisting that everyone use the most granular term available, that'd be a total dick move. It's more that I don't feel they should be dismissed as pointless. I'm not likely to get especially hung up on them either, if someone refers to a band as shoegaze that I'd say was post rock I'm not going to get sneery and tell them they're wrong but I find it interesting to delineate between styles. I like being able to see how genres splinter and morph over time as musicians take influences from outside their particlar domain. That's fascinating to me but I can see how it would bore others. No beef!

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But what is the big difference, say between, 'post rock', 'post hardcore' or just rock music? It just seems a bit wanky to me at times. 

 

If someone asks me what my band is like, i just tell them its a rock band, i dont need to be any more specific than that, because anything more specific is just limiting the people i can hopefully reach. 

 

Yep

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We get slated by some metal bands/fans in Aberdeen because they say we're too 'pop/rock-y' and we're asked often what category of music we would say we are - the answer is always the same - we have no idea as so many of our influences span a lot of different bands and therefore a lot of different genres.

 

Also, I have no idea what 'crabcore' is. Or sludge metal. Is this different from regular metal?

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I was quite hung up on genres when I was younger, but I sort of became much less interested in what was labelled as what as I got older. I grew up listening to punk rock. My parents were/are punks, so I guess that's something I've always identified with, and probably still do. Punk evolved into more than just the trashy 3 chord stuff, and there's lots of bands who continue to ply their trade with a punk rock ethos, whilst not really sounding all that punk. Bands like Converge and Karate consider themselves to be punk bands, but they couldn't possibly be further away from each other in terms of sound and style. If you were to listen to either band, you probably wouldn't consider either to be a punk rock band in a truest form, so it is quite interesting how bands pigeonhole themselves and how the listener does.

 

Other than punk rock, I don't really have any sort of attachment to other genres, and just whatever sounds good sounds good. In an age where music is so widely accessible on the internet, genres probably aren't quite as important as they used to be compared to when you either listened to the radio, bought a CD or went to a gig to hear music.

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I like the basics of rock, pop, jazz, metal, blues and so forth. I can accept that further qualification can be helpful, however... in metal for example, I like a lot of groovy, prog-y stuff, and don't like much in the way of trad thrash or death metal. But I definitely agree with Neepheid the "granularity" and the tiny differences between them, are ridiculous. Dude plays something detuned, and it's "death metal"; tune the guitar back up to standard, play the same thing, "black metal". Play one soaring metal track in a major key, "battle pirate metal" (this may not be the fully authentic term...); play the next one with a dorian melody, whoaahh, you've become a "celtic folk metal" band. It gets to the point where apparently you can have a bunch of different genres in your gig posters, blog reviews etc. just by playing similar songs in different keys.

 

I do think it can have a detrimental effect too. With some of the (here we go) djent or mathrock bands I like, for example, I sometimes feel like their sound is so specific that I can listen to any few tracks from an album and it'll be awesome, but listen to the whole thing and I'll get bored.

 

Another thing I love is that everything that's not big in the West is "world music". We can slice any of our genres into a million pointless bits, and then squish those of other regions/culture into blobs, and then put all those into just one giant non-genre.

Edited by scottyboy
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See, this is what I mean - am I massively out of touch or are there just far too many 'genres' now? What the hell is mathrock?

 

Also, 'World Music' is the same anywhere in the world - when I lived in Singapore, in their Tower Records store, all the Western bands (even the likes of Oasis, Robbie Williams etc) were chucked under the category 'World Music'. Singapore has a pretty well followed Asian pop scene.

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