A look back at ten years of genre shittiness (for Jon)

[doppelkorn]

As I turn into an old cynical cunt I find myself agreeing with Vice more and more and it feels awful.

 

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/wot-do-u-call-it-v10n12

 

 

 

I became a music writer in 2003, just in time to watch ingenuity and originality gasp their last breath. It was a notable time because grime, one of the last major forward-looking musical genres to originate in the UK, was already about to go completely overground with Dizzee winning the Mercury Prize. The other great British innovation of the same period, dubstep, had been gestating for at least half a decade already, even if it was still a year or so away from making an impact beyond specialist clubs. For people who had no interest in the cutting edge of black/urban electronic dance music, it was a grim time indeed. Working as a member of staff on a mainstream music magazine at that time was a bit like a cross between Groundhog Day and the really distressing last 20 minutes of Downfall.

Every day you’d come in and the boss, with shaking hands, would say, “Everyone who wasn’t involved in putting Hot Hot Heat on the cover of the latest issue leave the room now.” Everyone would stick a Luger in their gob and spray their brains straight across the cover of NME’s New Rock Revolution issue, which had been pinned to the office wall. After lunch you’d get in from the pub to find Eva Braun dancing on a table, swigging champagne out of a bottle, declaring: “Don’t worry everyone! The Polyphonic Spree are here to save us!”

It soon became clear that every single sensible combination of sounds, beats and melodies had just been used up and now the component parts could only be stuck back together in ever more ungainly ways. It was only a matter of time before some gibbous, oxygen-thieving bell end with long hair and a beard would stick the terms indie and grime together to come up with grindie. Although in my defence, when I coined the nomenclature in 2004 it was a derisive joke in the context of the phrase: “What next? Grindie?” I didn’t realise that by the time Statik and Larrikin Love were chumming up together it would be used without any apparent irony by my colleagues at the NME and the broadsheets. If the term grindie seemed ill-advised at the time, from the lofty hindsight-enriched perspective of 2012 it looks like a colossally, bizarrely bad idea. Kind of like asbestos, or naming your wedding DJ company Jim’ll Mix It.

Despite several shockingly see-through attempts to serve us yesterday’s listeria-ridden pig slop leftovers warmed through in the microwave – new grave, urchin rock, gritpop, Thamesbeat, nu-folk,shroomadelica and Afropop – indie had one ace up its sleeve in the form of new rave. Sure, it was recombinant and loathed by serious critics and armchair dance experts who hated its day-glo, fun, inauthentic nature, but this truly exciting and DIY scene combined with a glut of rocket-powered MDMA and the initial boom in neo-electro from the Modular, Ed Banger and Kitsuné labels led to a year or two of intensely enjoyable partying.

Even naysayers would have to admit that new rave was MDMAzing when compared to what we have now: EDMor Electronic Dance Music. Despite its utilitarian, almost sexy nomenclature, EDM is utter fucking neo-trance bilge for those who can’t tell the difference between a nightclub and the Stanford Prison Experiment. So we’re talking David Guetta, Afrojack and that cunt with the big metal rat helmet. Seriously, America, what the actual fuck? Your boys (mainly gay and/or black but still your boys) invented techno and house in the fucking 80s and you decide to wait 25 years until some spray-tanned berk from France who looks like Owen Wilson inZoolander does this to it before you’ll dance to it? It’s a fucking disgrace.

Which brings me on to the rest of us being tardy in getting our heads round other black/urban innovations in music. In the early 90s in Memphis, DJ Spanish Fly was helping mould the crunk sound on tunes like “Trigga Man” and “Smoking Onion” and the genre had certainly arrived by the release of Lil’ Jon & the East Side Boyz’Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album in 1997. Chopped and screwed is probably even older; DJ Screw claimed to have started pitching down tracks as far back as 1990. The same goes for hyphy, backpack hip-hop andstoner rap. This year you haven’t been able to move for lazy magazine articles claiming that trap is so new it’s not even been codified yet – but in reality, even this Memphis innovation dates back to the 90s, to pre-fame Three 6 Mafia, UGK and Project Pat. I guess you could say that trill wave is a relatively recent Southern hip-hop innovation covering such notables as the amazing A$AP Rocky, the annoying Lil B and the chilly SpaceGhostPurrp. Yet, more cynical men than me have commented on the surprising amount of crossover between trill and trap. “Ayo! Motherfucking Venn diagram looks like one circle, y’all,” said one outraged cultural theorist who didn’t want to be named.

But surely whitey must have done something with all these astounding influences when they crossed over into the mainstream? Damn straight – he invented witch house. (Full disclosure, joking aside: I think Gatekeeper, Mater Suspiria Vision and Salem are great… well, I think some of Salem’s records are great at least. Which is cool, because I’m 95 percent sure that the King Night album is what I was listening to the last two times I saw them play “live”.) People on the blogosphere (aka the dole) tried their hardest to give this extremely short-lived fad a different – but essentially much worse – name. Alternatives suggested included such peaches as drag,goth crunk, juke goth, The Ice Planet Goth, crunkin’ gothnuts, post-ghost, boo haus, ghost modern,Happiness is a Warm Goth and Bela Lugosi’s swag. However, there will be a particularly hot and irritating corner of hell reserved for the Brooklyn band Creep and the Pitchfork journalist who tried to up the ante by calling the whole thing rape gaze.

Weirdly, despite arguably being the most sonically progressive and inventive mainstream genre of the last ten years, R’n’B doesn’t really seem to have thrown up any particularly memorable or clearly defined sub-genres. Much to the dismay of fans of Usher and Ciara, the indie kids and hipsters have been getting in on the act to bring you PBR&B or R-Neg-B, a smacky, bro-friendly take on 80s/90s smooth music, with Gayngs, Destroyer and the Weeknd being the best and worst of the bunch, designed to give the bromantic a broner, which then may require the attention of bromide. Or a court-sanctioned brostraining order preventing you from going within 100 metres of her house.

On much safer critical ground we have reggaeton, a Hispanic/Jamaican dancehall hybrid which is ideal for people who are half my age, weigh 50 percent less and are wearing 50 percent fewer clothes than me to dance to.

Probably the most dominant of the new genres has been dubstep, which has firmly pierced the mainstream to the extent that not even a CD single by Military Wives gets released without a Chase & Status mix. Perhaps it’s predictable then that there have been many offshoots including blubstep (Boo hoo! It’s James Blake), pubstep (Oi! Oi! It’s Magnetic Man) and clown shoes (Wub! Wub! It’s Skrillex) and whatever that thing that Jamie xx does is called. Weirdly, no genre’s critical respectability has improved like that of heavy metal over the last decade. After the atrocity of nu metal, funk metal and deathcore in the late 90s, drone, war metal, djent, metal gaze, transcendent black metal, green metal, occult rock, NWONWOBHM andhorrortronix have righted the balance with viking metal being good fun at least. We’ve only really been let down by the real ale-fart smelling, UKIP-compliant, cowardly xenophobia of heritage metal and the post-enjoyable post-metal.

Elsewhere, the class system is as entrenched as ever with cakeeating aristocrats and the upper middle classes (hypnagogic pop), the students (chill wave) and the lumpen proletariat (glo-fi) all having different names for the same genre, which is not dissimilar to listening to Hall & Oates on a Walkman with a head injury while throwing orange-tinted Polaroids of your 1982 summer holiday to Morecambe into a swimming pool. The rest of the feral underclass had shit gaze, which, oddly, didn’t trouble the charts much.

Probably the most inventive, ground-breaking genre of the last decade outside of dance music is, weirdly in some respects, also the most backward-looking. Hauntology applies some of hip-hop’s plundering and recombinant ethos to forgotten strands of British audio-visual culture such as school TV programmes, health and safety films, Radiophonic Workshop electronica and modular synth-rich library music.

All in all, what does it all mean? I’m not sure but there’s no space left for me to talk about bands who use a triangle instead of the letter A in their names, and for that small mercy alone I’m thankful.

 

[Jon]

You'll have a field day when i post my next mix up this weekend It features some witch house

[Jimmy]

there's only 2 types of music: good and bad.

 

witch house

 

fixed

 

on a more serious note, do you know where all these names come from Jon? I'm asking as you seem to be clued up on it all.

is it all under the umbrella of future beats and stuff, and thats why you know about it, or is that something else again and you just hunt down these types of genres.

[doppelkorn]

on a more serious note

 

Hang on, let me put on my serious music discussion hat

 

Ok, ready!

 

do you know where all these names come from Jon? I'm asking as you seem to be clued up on it all.

is it all under the umbrella of future beats and stuff, and thats why you know about it, or is that something else again and you just hunt down these types of genres.

 

Music journalists make them up

[Jon]

Most of it is internet-journalist hype for bands that have slightly different takes on sounds or combinations of sounds. I find it gets a bit silly with names, as long as it's good music that's all that matters, but I try and keep on top of them in order to find new music.

 

Without googling I can give you examples of chopped and screwed, hyphy, backpack hiphop, stoner rap and trill wave, which are all quite common strands of hip hop, chopped and screwed being probably the most famous one. Backpack hiphop seems to be more of an insult by people who dislike labels like Anticon/Rhymesayers/Strange Famous etc. I used to be pretty into that sort of stuff, so I never really used the name myself but always understood why people would call it that:

 

e.g.:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmTo_UjQ5ZI

 

 

 

Hyphy:

Hyphy:

 

Trill wave:

 

The ironic thing about witch house is that it isn't all that housey, and is more slightly spooky atmospheric music (hence 'witch') with regular beats.

 

 

http://youtu.be/kwMc91DQXHU

[Jimmy]

The ironic thing about witch house is that it isn't all that housey, and is more slightly spooky atmospheric music (hence 'witch') with regular beats.

 

 

http://youtu.be/kwMc91DQXHU

 

yeh thats really not what i was expecting from that name. it seems i group most of this stuff just under electronica.

 

i've also taken to naming music with bpm rather than genre.

'what you do play'

'170/85'

[Jon]

Word, I think of it that way too I think, though in the back of my mind thinking about possibilities where you can slow down/speed up other tunes into the bpm range you're currently in that have a similar feel.

[motosega]

i've also taken to naming music with bpm rather than genre.

'what you do play'

'170/85'

this!!!!!

 

i'm organizing all my music at the moment, which is a real pain in the ass.

 

i just don't know what genre most of my music is, and i'm getting to the point where i really don't care anymore,

 

i'm basicly breaking it down into quantized and non quantized in different folders and searching by bpm.

 

i can understand that its useful to have names for cliche based genres like dubstep and deathmetal,

but 'trap' and 'witch house'? really? your just getting put in the electronic folder, fuck you.

[Jon]

go tell mala he's a cliche....

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVpjPuzlvus

 

Before brostep and the USA EDM generation got their grubby hands on it, dubstep was a largely innovative movement where not many acts sounded alike and to many people tracks made 6-10 years ago still stand the test of time and hold cultural value.

 

If electronica is something you only dj occasionally than I agree that broad term does the job, but when you mainly play electronic music you need to be more specific. Drum and bass, for example, can be mean a whole load of different things to different people and has a whole variety of contrasting sub-scenes and audiences. I tend to base my sets around bpm too, but as much as I'm all for blurring boundaries and not making genre/sub-genre specific music, I think having a record collection broken down into sub-genres is really useful when thinking on the fly when playing out. It arguably makes you more musically aware too as you'll start looking in other places for music.

[mattnice]

never heard of witch house before, im sure back in the 90's it was called Trip Hop.

[mattnice]

I've started listening to Wizard Trance.

 

Its basically recorder music.

[motosega]

don't get me wrong, i'm no dubstep hater, 140bpm is one of my favourite tempos

 

maybe cliche is a harsh word 'distinctive' might be better

 

you don't need to be an expert on dubstep to recognise a dubstep tune, thats what i'm saying.

 

now i think about it though i don't know if i can tell the difference between death metal and black metal.

 

i think that to recognize a witch house tune, you'd have to know who made it, because it might be some random tune that just sounds a bit spooky. thats where it gets pointless.

Edited January 1, 2013 by motosega

[mattnice]

so is Thriller Witch House?

[Jon]

nope, just as rolling stones having guitars in their songs doesn't make them death metal

[mattnice]

but its a scaryish tune and has a normal beat im sure thats the description for witch house

[Jon]

ha, I was being a bit lazy with my definition.

[mattnice]

slacker

[motosega]

i thought about this when i was washing the dishes the other day.

 

genere is all to do with who made the reccord and who their mates are, not what it actualy sounds like.

 

which is why genere naming is crazy, because music is by definition about what it sounds like.

[d00ban]

Is Araab Muzik Witch house? That's kind of spooky in my ears...

[DJ Rock Well]

After reading this thread I diligently researched "witch house"...

 

Very disappointed I'm afraid. As the name suggests, I was at least expecting some witches and some house music. Not so.

 

To my ears it sounded like a very slight variation on the same old low quality electronic music made in some kid's bedroom from VST presets. It wasn't even spooky, although some of it was quite dreary and it was kind of unified by it all sounding like something I couldn't and wouldn't dance to.

[doppelkorn]

HA!

[djdiggla]

Now I'm gonna have to look into witch house