Speaking in musical tongues

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/01/2003 (8348 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A few years ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop trying not to eavesdrop on a couple of university students discussing music at the next table. Their debate: Whether or not a certain DJ/producer’s music was “dark ambient” or “ambient techno.”

Each argued passionately for their own definition. Each seemed to believe in the descriptive power of sub-categorization, apparently oblivious to the fact most people would be hard-pressed to come up with a good definition of even more basic musical terms, like “techno” or “ambient” alone.

Music fans feel the need to come up with sub-genres like this because they serve as a form of conceptual shorthand.

They allow people who share the same tastes to have more specific and accurate musical conversations, just like psychologists versed in the same form of academic jargon.

But problems arise when two people who don’t belong to the same musical sub-culture try to talk to each other.

Often, they’ll find themselves at the musicological version of the Tower Of Babel, where the same words mean different things (“hard rock,” for instance, has nothing to do with “hard house”), different terms mean the same thing (“prog” and “math rock,” for example) or some labels simply become incomprehensible (try describing “baroque” or “bebop” to a hip-hop fan and see how far you get).

Sadly, the process of sub-categorization has intensified in recent years, to the point where basic terms such as rock, jazz, country, classical, rap, blues, electronic and folk are the only ones left with any descriptive value.

A few sub-genres make sense, such as punk or big band. But others need to be eradicated from the face of the Earth, because they serve no purpose other than to confuse.

The worst offenders are the 10 following terms, which deserve to be banished from music journalism and music conversations for all eternity:

ALT-ROCK

During the decade between the rise of underground label SST Records and the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, “alternative rock” was a genuine musical movement comprised of inventive and popular bands ignored by the mainstream media and commercial radio.

While there was no definitive “alternative” sound, acts like Sonic Youth, Hsker D and The Pixies characterized the movement, which lost all sense of purpose once grunge made superstars out of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and the rest of their early ’90s contemporaries.

Strangely, the term “alt-rock” — a stupid abbreviation in the first place — continues to be used today to describe angst-ridden guitar bands, even though this has been the dominant paradigm in rock for more than a decade.

There’s nothing alternative about alt-rock, especially if the likes of Creed and Linkin Park are its new standard-bearers.

DEATHCORE

Along with gothcore, grindcore, black metal, speedcore, speed metal, thrash metal, thrashcore and a host of other labels, this is one of many ways of sub-categorizing the musical niche inhabited by the most extreme heavy rock in the world.

The nuances that separate these sub-genres are all but unnoticeable to people who aren’t completely immersed in modern metal. Just like electronic dance music and punk rock, metal has been subdivided to the point where almost every artist deserves their own genre.

GARAGE

Back in the ’60s, “garage” referred to noisy, guitar-based rock bands that weren’t obsessed with sounding as smooth or rehearsed as The Beatles. For decades, this was one of the better names in the music-labelling business — everyone can relate to enthusiastic, unpolished rock ‘n’ roll blaring out of a neighbourhood garage.

But all that ended when a New York City dance club called Paradise Garage became so influential, electronic music journalists named a style of house music after it. Now, “garage” can mean two totally unrelated things: modern disco with a lot of vocals, or The Hives.

To make matters worse, there’s speedgarage, which is faster dance music, not speed metal (see above).

EMO

People who listen to indie rock — and nothing but indie rock — swear this a real genre, defined as punk or punk-pop fraught with more personal, sentimental or emotional musical and/or lyrical content.

As a descriptive term, it has little value, because the definition is inherently subjective. It also implies bands that don’t fly the emo flag somehow possess less emotional depth — as if the heartthrobs in Dashboard Confessional, Get Up Kids or The Promise Ring are deeper than a political punk band like Propagandhi.

Emo is short for “emotional,” a term which has no practical application in the real world, where most people assume it refers to a flightless bird from New Zealand or a comedian whose last name is Phillips.

INDIE

While “indie rock” is perfectly acceptable as a means of describing artists who aren’t signed to major labels, the term is an economic designation, not a musical one.

Therefore, applying the label “indie” to a sound is patently ridiculous, because that means either the band or the genre has to change when one of its purveyors gets signed by a big record company.

That being said, “indie” had a lot of currency in the mid-1990s, when some critics used it to describe scrappy independent bands with scruffy vocals and low-fi production values.

Unfortunately, that spawned even more useless sub-genre names, the worst of which are “indie-folk” (essentially, young acoustic bands with cool haircuts) and “indie pop” (apparently, indie rock bands who aren’t afraid of melodies or strong musicianship).

MATH ROCK

Back in the ’70s, rock bands that played suite-length epics featuring complex time signatures and abrupt rhythm changes were called progressive rock bands. Genesis, Yes, Can, Moody Blues and Frank Zappa were all described as prog at one point or another.

Unfortunately, rock ‘n’ roll thrives on a form of collective amnesia, whereby new generations of musicians and music fans grow up ignorant of everything that went before. So when they discover 7/4 time, they need to invent a new genre to encapsulate it.

To most people, “math rock” sounds like it should be music about mathematics, in which case, Winnipeg’s Math With Marty Green would be a leading light.

But in reality, “math rock” applies to indie rock bands who consider themselves too cool to be progressive — though in a blind listening test, Dance On A Volcano, the first track off Genesis’ 1976 classic A Trick Of The Tail, sounds like the apex of their genre.

I’m pretty sure Phil Collins is drumming in 15/8 time in one of the later passages.

POST ROCK

“Rock is dead,” proclaimed the British music rags in the ’90s, when bubblegum pop bands banished the dying remnants of the grunge movement from the airwaves and charts. That paved the way for a new generation of relatively formless instrumental bands who backed away from verse-chorus-verse song structures to get their own genre.

First used to describe Tortoise, the term post-rock has been thrown at everybody from rock bands Radiohead and Mogwai to soundscape specialists Sigur Ros and Brian Eno to bona fide audio artists like David Grubbs.

Add in electronic music producers like Chords Of Canada and their imitators, and suddenly the vaunted post-rock movement includes everyone creative enough to avoid AC/DC-style guitar riffs for more than 30 seconds.

“Post-rock” also makes no chronological sense, as people like Eno were ditching structure 30 years ago. That’s long before some of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll was ever recorded.

The fact is, rock isn’t dead — and when it is, an entirely new genre will write the epitaph.

PROGRESSIVE HOUSE

The DJ crowd may insist otherwise, but trance with a few big crescendos should not constitute a genre unto itself. “Progressive house” is just one of dozens of electronic music sub-genres that don’t deserve to exist — but do simply because some fans are focused too intensely on one genre.

If you need an analogy, consider a friend who eats only french fries. After a while, your friend will claim there are dozens of distinct varieties of fries, and will use fancy names like pommes frtes and potato fritters to describe them, all the while insisting his use of increasingly flowery language only helps more specifically and accurately describe the world of chips.

The fact is, he needs to eat something else — just like your DJ buddy needs to put some Pete Seeger into his headphones on occasion. The Inuit have 17 words for snow too, you know.

POWER POP

In the ’70s and ’80s, power-pop referred to melodic bands with big guitars, like Big Star, Cheap Trick or The Knack. Today, the indie-rock bubble boys apply the term to independent bands that rock out like The Who, such as Guided By Voices or Apples In Stereo.

If there’s any rhyme or reason to the usage, it’s unclear.

TRIP-HOP

This is a meaningless industry buzzword, not a style of music.

Like New Wave in the early ’80s, “trip-hop” can mean anything you want it to: The mellow tones of modern folkie Beth Orton, world-weary grooves laid down by Portishead or any other combination of laid-back vocals layered over electronic drums, keyboards and samples.

Today, almost every pop singer and rock band has these elements in their sonic toolkit, so it’s pointless to assign a genre to what essentially is an arrangement configuration.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca