Back in 2012 Bruce Springsteen was given the honour of being the Keynote Speaker at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Of course he took his duty very seriously opening with, "Good morning! Why are we up so .... early? How important can this speech be if we're giving it at noon? It can't be that important. Every decent musician in town is asleep, or they will be before I'm done with this thing, I guarantee you."
He went on to talk about Music and its meaning and in one section spoke about Genres, which was incredibly funny:
"There are so many sub–genres and fashions, two–tone, acid rock, alternative dance, alternative metal, alternative rock, art punk, art rock, avant garde metal, black metal, black and death metal, Christian metal, heavy metal, funk metal, bland metal, medieval metal, indie metal, melodic death metal, melodic black metal, metal core, hard core, electronic hard core, folk punk, folk rock, pop punk, Brit pop, grunge, sad core, surf music, psychedelic rock, punk rock, hip hop, rap rock, rap metal, Nintendo core, huh?
I just want to know what a Nintendo core is, myself. But rock noir, shock rock, skate punk, noise core, noise pop, noise rock, pagan rock, paisley underground, indy pop, indy rock, heartland rock, roots rock, samba rock, screamo–emo, shoegazing stoner rock, swamp pop, synth pop, rock against communism, garage rock, blues rock, death and roll, lo–fi, jangle pop, folk music. Just add neo– and post– to everything I said, and mention them all again. Yeah, and rock and roll."
If you want to read the rest of Bruce's Speech, Rolling Stone Magazine have a transcript of it here. Oh and you can actually see the Speech here. Word of warning, the speech does contain some strong language at times.
If you want to see just how crazy this all is check out Here the Wikipedia page spotlighting Popular Music Genres!
Not totally sure where the need to put everything in a box (genre) stemmed from but surely it has made us all a bit too much of a music snob! If you like one particular genre how on earth can you like something else in what seems like a total opposite genre!
There was a bit of conversation going with my friend Joe Bone (he has a great band by the way, Joe Bone and The Dark Vibes) about the issue of music genres and whether they die or not. Joe said this, "punk is music so if you say punk is dead then you're saying music is dead, music doesn't die, so called music genres don't die they just gets less popular, until they reinvent themselves again. ... music lives forever no matter what t-shirt you wear". Joe is absolutely spot on by the way and I could think of numerous examples of how a particular style has reinvented itself but here's one just as an aside. Blue Beat is famous for the Ska sound but's interesting looking at the label's history to discover that a lot of it's sound is rooted in Rock 'n' Roll, R&B, the Blues even (have a listen here) and of course Ska went on to develop further with Rocksteady and a whole boat load of other styles. I'm just waiting for the band that comes along that manages to create a combination of Screamo, Middle of the Road, Americana, Stoner rock, Hardcore - and we'll call it Smash Music!
And a nice chap called Fishbones Glover (he's an amazing Photographer of all things musical) contributed to the chat and maybe summed it all up best when he said "There's only two types of music. Stuff you like and stuff you don't."
I kinda like that from Fishbones. It all sounds pretty simple doesn't it? But it's true. One of the things you will glean from this blog is that there is a very wide range of music listened to. I don't necessarily expect everyone to like what I post (it's nice when people do though) but ultimately it comes down to the things that are posted are musical sounds that I like (not matter how old, new, odd, obscure, seemingly opposite, or happy to sit side by side it is).
Have a great day.
Let The Day Begin...Let The Day Start!
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