The Music Genre Isn’t Dead, It's Just Been Watered Down to Indie Nothingness

Here’s an early 2015 town cry to music fans and writers to try and end the lazy and domesticated ways that music is being described, categorized and shared.

The need for oversimplified words and catchphrases to describe artists’ music is understandable. When a 90-year old asks ‘what type of music is this?’ with regards to Skinny Puppy, a simple ‘rock and roll’ is probably the best reply. But when it comes to music fans and writers we should be doing better.

It’s trying when in 2015, an artist who sounds like the Goo Goo Dolls describe themselves as “genreless” but if you’re going to describe St. Vincent to a potential teenage fan, as indie rock, or even art rock, then you are also part of this reductionist problem.

Hot potato journalism has always existed, but in the last decade it’s created a mainstreamed atmosphere of non-progression and phony ‘underground-ness’. Anything produced more than six degrees from Max Martin is snidely yet proudly self-positioned on the ironic fringes of times past. This leads to even more ridiculous popular conclusions like “guitars are dead” or “the best ‘music’ happened in the 60s/70s/80s/90s.”

Just as news journalists have a responsibility to decide between words like ‘psychopath’ and ‘terrorist’, or ‘teen’ and ‘thug’, music fans and journalists have a similar responsibility to understand, create and propagate nuance in the musical world.

This issue isn't new. The artist vs. journalist vs. consumer dilemna is decades old, but I believe we’ve arrived at a point where “classic genre music” of the twentieth century is over, and the lack of nuance is completely stunting the progression of popular music narratives. This is one of the most exciting, prolific and amazing times in music, yet that is far from the current narrative. As Brian Eno points out, for the first time, artists have the entire history of popular music and production at their fingertips to learn and build from. And they are. It’s not their fault many people think good music climaxed ages ago.

The Cure, Dirty Projectors, Deerhunter, FKA Twigs, Clockcleaner, Tame Impala, Kurt Vile, The Smiths, The Pixies, Future Islands, Flipper, 2Pac, Jackson Scott, MGMT, Weezer, Ariel Pink, Odd Future, Crystal Stilts, are all described in one way or another as indie pop/rock/rap/punk. Just because you whack ‘indie’ in front shouldn’t absolve the responsibility of identifying discernible difference from artist to artist or era to era. This is especially true when modern production techniques, ideas on commerciality, distribution channels, lyrical/referential depth, manufacturing format, time in history, and all else are taken into consideration.

If not ‘indie-fied’, usually some partial element is fixated on - like a Tame Impala riff or one MGMT lyric - to the point of even more lazy narratives. Why can’t all art be given the space for its own story, or at least try to be more honestly portrayed to illuminate very real narratives of progress?

Access to information shouldn't mean that we oversimplify and understand less, but rather, figure out and disseminate exactly who’s doing what, how, and why. Imagine what Lester Bangs would be doing if he had the kind of information we do.

Words like rock, indie, blues, post-punk, or techno, have very specific connotations, or should, that if and when repeated over decades or centuries, lose the very essence of what they are or were supposed to be. They especially lose meaning when I read countless – and often disregarded - interviews with artists involved, repeating that they are not those things, for such and such reason – either because of how they produce the music, or because they sell all their songs to commercials despite being labeled ‘punk’ or whatever other reason. I think I can safely say that as of present, there is no deserving artist that should or could simply fall under any of those categories. All valuable art that is currently made will have incorporated innumerous histories, genres and production techniques into its work, that to call something like Tame Impala “psychedelic rock” completely misses the point and development of what is actually taking place.

When one thinks of psychedelic rock, do hip-hop beats, DJ software, Western Australia, Kylie Minogue, and sad songs about having no friends come to mind? Then why does Tame Impala get labeled when little about the project is really psychedelic rock-ish save for a handful of songs written over a decade ago? I would argue that Tame Impala is far more EDM seen through the eyes of the Seventies than it is psych rock.

We need new words and new understandings. The way many artists are approaching their craft now is far removed from the days of Joy Division or YMO. This lazy journalism completely negates the experimental progression. Ignores the orchestral construction and encyclopedically referential songwriting that goes on – a la Ariel Pink’s The Doldrums, Tame Impala’s Lonerism or Swans’ To Be Kind– and turns it into weird indie pop, psych rock or heavy guitar music, respectively.

Ariel Pink is not “weird indie pop”. Not when he’s been brought up on the Cure's Seventeeen Seconds, R. Stevie Moore, Throbbing Gristle, black metal and Michael Jackson. I can’t imagine somebody with that kind of diet creating anything else. So let’s not negate these factors and shove it all into some stupid fringe indie category.

Pop music pontificator and longtime friend and fan of Ariel Pink, John Maus, has said that when The Doldrums, Pink’s second album from the Haunted Graffiti series, was released, it should have had a similar impact in the way that one might’ve torn down their Guns and Roses posters upon hearing Nirvana, or sold their Pink Floyd collection upon first hearing punk. His theory was that maybe that’s just the way pop music will unfold in Soundcloud time, which I partially agree with. But I also believe that, due to language, lexicon and/or referential limitations, it’s often difficult to even know what to be artistically looking for, and instead, sit around waiting for something like obvious garage rock revivalism a la The Strokes, The Libertines or Franz Ferdinand, sending the trajectory of music on another arguably unnecessary post-Chumbawumba tangent. I love those bands, but post-Cobain, they belonged on the fringes, not Ariel Pink.

This isn’t about snidely asking a person to fabricate an entire lexicon in order to create employment. It’s about opening a discussion to create a language that is fitted for the twenty first century, that allows for the popular progression of narrative, to reclaim it from the phony self-imposed fringes and put it in everyman’s words. There aren’t really any ‘fringes’ left in the Internet-era, so it’s okay to stop pretending and start sharing.

Early in his career Mac DeMarco – albeit semi-mockingly–called his own music “jizz jazz”; silly, but that’s the kind of descriptive directions we should be talking about and building. “Guitar music” isn’t “dead” anymore than it was in 1967 because no one sounded like Woody Guthrie.

Let’s find the words and describe things properly. It’s worth it.

Steven Viney is a writer living in Melbourne - @stevenviney