I used to argue with a friend about genre a lot in that music-focused book-club-style thing I mention from time to time. He'd be like "insistence upon genre as a system is a needlessly reductive way of looking at art that boxes in all those who subscribe to it", and I'd be all like "genre is a necessary and useful method of delineating between stylistic approaches and collecting like-minded people together", and he'd be all like "why are you being so fucking closed-minded, you stupid cunt, I hate you so much", and I'd be like "fam I will literally end your shit right now, I've killed before and I will kill again", and then my lawyer says I can't continue this run-on sentence, but, as is probably clear, we were arguing at cross purposes. He was looking at this from the perspective of an artist, whereas I was looking at it from the perspective of a consumer. The utility of a genre descriptor for a music fan is one of legibi
god save riffs and jams, in all the different varieties! It's that sentence that has made everyone mad since Buddy and Ritchie and the other bloke passed on and Elvis joined the army: rock is dead. At the risk of completely embarrassing myself I think it's true this time. Genres only really get five or six decades to be truly Relevant before they become heritage concerns to be maintained and not innovated within. The blues went from the delta c. 1900 to Chicago clubs in the Fifties before it entered its preservation era in the 60s. "How can you say that when people like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix considered themselves bluesmen?" A of all, you cannot ask artists where they would place themselves critically, because assuming they don't get it wildly wrong like Clapton or Hendrix they will all uniformly say "A bit of everything, really. We just make music , man." Even I, normally the exact kind of nerd you can count on to delineate things properly, fall