When I stopped viewing genre as a description of the musical mechanics at play and instead a marker of community, the lines made a lot more sense to me
@@farkasmactavish Genres are a form of categorization used primarily by average people. They are informed by and defined by the masses. What academics think of them is not all that relevant because their understanding is not the recognized consensus.
@@danielflanard8274 That's like saying that cultures are a categorization used by average people that are informed and decided by the masses. No. Genres are categories which can be studied and defined. Is there overlap sometimes? Sure! One of the few differences between heavy metal and classical is the instruments; the chord progression, time signatures, and other composition choices are incredibly similar, which is why it's so easy and common to create cover versions of songs from each genre into the other. But that doesn't mean "Genre is, like, made up, _maaaan!"_
The thing about "by definition, everything is music" is that it's kind of underscored by the running joke of "drone/ambient fan spends 15 minutes entranced by a new song they later discover is a piece of industrial machinery running in the background", which while very funny does actually happen sometimes in my experience, meaning that in a way music is defined by our capacity to enjoy it as music, and if you expand that capacity the scope of what can be considered expands with it. Like I have unironically sat down and enjoyed the sound of a generator running. it's like listening to birdsong, but for fans of underground metal.
Andrew Huang does a series where he gathers some music producers together to make original tracks or remixes all based on a single shared sample. The sample is usually a snippet of an existing song, but ro this day, my favorite episode of that series is the one where their sample was just a recording of a door closing. But the thing is, the reason that recording exists is because someone heard it and thought it sounded musical, and it does! And a lot of the tracks made from it keep or are inspired by that song the door was singing. Stuff like that is awesome, man.
Have you ever listened to the album "Music For Living Sound" by Yann Tomita? listening to that album has genuinely redefined my concept for what music can be
Love the intelligent discourse on the subject. One thing that I think is important to keep in mind is that genre labels, though arising from a simple human impulse to discuss & classify artistic nuance & idiosyncrasies, has largely been historically used as a tool of classist oppression (pre-recorded music), & later a method of advertising & commodifying recorded music as a tool of the recording industry, which exists largely to propagate & justify it's own existence. & I think we can all agree that it's best for art & those who make it to not normalize anything that mainly exists to commodify it... Right?
This feels like the start of a split in youtube music theory discourse akin to how literary academics started infighting in the 20th century to eventually create a bigger picture surrounding literature
"it's about the history!" "it's about the structure!" "It's about the artist!" "It's about the music itself!" "It's about the listener!" "It's about people!" "It's about society!" "Ok maybe it's about history again?!"
It is funny, because as a theorist I often talked with my literary Theory friends and explain to them that we are basically having the same conversation they had years ago. It makes me sad, but I'm also glad we're finally having these conversations
I dunno it's more a battle between people who don't want to read and dissect existing literature and those who do. The whole crux of the video hinges on how Polyphonic decided not to read and dissect the paper (and to respond to the general existing literature and opinion). You don't have to "be an academic" to read papers. Honestly not really sure why Polyphonic chose to engage with Fabbri in the first place if it's quickly sidelined. It bothers me because it's a form of willful ignorance that is common in other parts of modern life
Ah, yes, the Fabri Paper. It played a big part in my master thesis. I applied it to Nu Metal to show how genres might influence each other. So, I strongly believe we need genre for context, to put a piece of music into relation to other ones and find out the nuance of compositional techniques in a piece of music. After all, no piece of music exists on its own, always in an environment with other pieces. To draw the lines of relationships through genre can help to see stylistic devices and how they develop. Again, Nu Metal is a great example of that. ... Thanks for the video to put the gerne discussion into perspective.
Ngl I think there's a reason to differentiate between abstract hip-hop and rage, or pop rock and stoner rock, or chamber-pop and dance-pop, and if I'm being recommended an artist I would want to know which one they belong to more.
I dont really agree cause if i told you “histoire sans paroles is a prog piece”, you wouldnt really get what it sounds like. Especially when genres get so specific that the average person doesnt know them I prefer using genres as a way to build a community of people with similar taste and most importantly, find new music. Once you get into the “greats” of a genre, you can find other important artists of that genre and other artists inspired by them and enjoy stuff
@@tolkienfan1972Kendrick Lamar is a cool rapper type dude who got really famous for making good music and carrying on the legacy of Hip-Hop. Drake is an attention-hungry content creator who thrives on drama, divisiveness, ironic homophobia, and ridiculous meme-like behaviors.
I think this piece was missing a deeper discussion of genre as an artifact of the sharing/selling of music/musical performances. It was addressed tangentially, but genres act as a way for music to be marketed and for audiences to find what they are looking for, a sort of less rigid Dewey decimal system for media. Some genres are entirely created or maintained for that purpose. Plenty of "Christmas songs" have no mention of Christmas in them. "Kids' music" can be as varied as a genre can be and is defined purely by target audience. Absent the role of genres in creating and experiencing media, they will always fundamentally arise from and be reinforced by needing a way to discuss it. More lines might be drawn and the lines people care about might change, but the lines will always be there and be important.
He does talk about genre being tied to marketing by the big labels over the last century, a practice supposedly dying out. The big labels may be on the ropes, but I don't see the notion of genre in any way fading. It's still used in its traditional sense to define, channel, or instigate music creation; to mark one's tastes and cultural allegiances; and to both market and seek out music that's similar to music X. It feels like he was just waiting to plug Nebula. Sponsored/affiliate videos are the bane of RUclips :(
@@MonkeyJedi99 You may not know him by name, but you've almost certainly heard music by Ligeti: one of his works is used as the "sound effect" that the obelisk makes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
When I was in high school, we were arguing that genres are dying and music discussions often delved into micro-genres. When I went back to university, after a ~10 year break, I would chuckle to myself as I heard students at the coffee shops and on the quad arguing that genres are dying and hearing them discuss music in terms of micro-genres. Roughly 10 years later, I'm now watching this video response about whether genres are dying and how relevant micro-genres are. Long story short? Genres evolve, there's a lot of interaction between genres, and every generation thinks they're the ones that broke it all.* 😆 *Case in point, and exactly as you said approaching the end about new music being a re-envisioning of music people grew up with from their parents, "modern no-wave" is pretty much first wave industrial but with more defined rhythm and better production values. (Think mid/late 70s to mid 80s, with Throbbing Gristle as the archetype.)
I haven't finished the video yet, but so far I suspect this has a lot to do with the divide between the ways people actually use language and the ways that some select academics would like language to be used, and then the academics forget that they don't dictate how language forms so they get confused and frustrated that the rest of the world isn't playing along.
As with many, many things in life, genres are rigid boxes into which humans try to categorize unique items. Some items fit cleanly within the bounds of a single box, but some inevitably turn out fuzzier than the model is prepared to deal with, and that's a failing of the model, not of the item. Ask a planetary geologist how to identify a planet, asteroid, or moon. Ask a geneticist what a species is. Ask a sociologist about gender. You'll inevitably end up with some variation on, "Hoo boy... well, it's complicated." And so with genre.
@@maxalaintwo3578as a sociology major, no. genders definition isn’t too complicated, but then you add gender identity, gender presentation, sex (also a social construct, but a story for another day), how gender varies by culture, etc, and it gets complicated pretty quickly
@@chesspiece4257 yeah allat’s a made up concept from the 50s by dudes like John Money and Alfred Kinsey, who performed entirely unethical and unscientific experiments to thinly justify their fetishes. Look up John Money experiments when you have the time, and bring a vomit bag with you. The only reason it’s made complicated now it to accommodate for modern sexual deviancy without people feeling rightfully bad
to me genres have turned more into descriptive building blocks of musical practices, culture and sounds the piece may contain rather than a description of the musical experience as a whole. In a way genres are more similar to how tempo and time signature describe a song than a description of the song's identity as a whole. One can describe an entire song all the way through, but also they're free to change at any point. Genres are even more flexible as multiple can overlap at the exact same time without issue.
That's what genre has always been, it's also why it kills me when the anti-genre ppl go off on genres as some kind of gatekeeping/elitism tactic because that was literally never what genre has been.
As an album-oriented rock guy, I've always seen genres more like family trees, where you can trace individual ideas in the songs/albums/artists style to those who came before, that create the genre.
As a diehard video game music enjoyer, boss battle is a huge genre, JRPG forest is a specific genre, ice level is a pretty big genre, and I could go on. I might not know the proper names of these genres, but I can tell they're different genres.
I am a fan of JRPG battle music (which can be adjacent to prog rock because some of the prominent games pull from that), so yes video game music is music, has genres, and is comparable to better recognized genres.
I think a huge component of "the demise of genre" are people people like me who grew up with MTV (back when they played music). They played rock, pop, rap, R&B, prog, etc. There are quite a few from my generation who were into both Hip Hop and Metal which probably wouldn't have happened earlier (just look at the folk/rock rivalry in the 60's or the hatred of disco and rise of punk in the 70's). Heck, now that the male country artists have stopped trying to sound like Garth Brooks and have gotten creative again, even the country vs rock barrier is eroding.
Modern pop country pretty much is late nineties/early aughts top 40 post-grunge rock with a twangy accent. In some cases quite literally such as Darius Rucker and Aaron Lewis. Which I think is an oft overlooked aspect in the decline of rock, the demo that in previous generations would be the dudebro butt rock fans are now country fans.
Genre really is just a set of expectations. Expectations flow and drift. If you subvert expectations enough, your expectations will adapt. Expectations are equally useful for describing a song or band to someone who's unfamiliar, and to record labels and other corporations looking for an audience to market their product to. As someone who buys a plurality of their music from Bandcamp and grabs another portion from Soundcloud, I am extremely interested to see where expectations go in the future, as we drift farther and farther away from corporate record labels (while hopefully avoiding the death of variety induced by a flattening algorithm - equally scary).
The very concept of controversy and civil disagreement is a good thing. I'm a fan of both you and Polyphonic, so I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
I feel like the controversy is actually around the willingness to read academic papers. If Polyphonic actually read the paper with the necessary effort (you don't need to "be an academic") then this disagreement would be a much lesser thing
In my opinion genre can be used as a guideline and it can be a useful tool, but at the same time, Genre isn’t a hard and fast end all be all objective descriptor. It’s not like a super specific scientific classification, it’s more fluid and nebulous.
The idea that genre is a culture is still there, it’s just more grouped together. I’m in high school, the alt kids or kids who would’ve been considered emo 15 or so years ago now are not defined by emo, but they also listen to a lot of punk, Nu metal, alt rock, etc.
Perhaps one sign of the power of genres is what happens when a piece flouts the genre's conventions. For example Iris DeMent's "Wasteland of the Free" has most of the elements of a Nashville country song (instrumentation, chord progression, emotional lyrical delivery etc.) - save for the radical social critique of the lyrics that left me (for one) pretty stunned on first hearing.
As a person in my 30s genre is how I used to sort vibes on my mp3 library. I was suprised to hear how much socially fitting is in your definition of genre. I have never really cared if I used the right language when talking about music I like but then again I dont make music theory videos.
Me? Don't mind me, I'm just sitting here in the comments section with popcorn, waiting for the reactions when someone calls "Black Metal," "Death Metal" by accident.
(Sorry this became a WoW, but I get emotional about this. And your comment was in fun. Sorry!) I used to feel comfortable calling myself a metalhead when that meant Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, King Diamond, Savatage - the earlier days. Metal was all you needed to say. Sure, there were huge differences (in hindsight) between Judas Priest and Savatage, but there were huge differences between Johnny Cash and Johnny Paycheck, though both were country. When hair bands ruled the airwaves in the late 80s, all was good, except for metalheads who couldn't stand the thought of following mainstream popular music. As soon as the hair bands were displaced by grunge and hip hop, it seemed metal was smashed into a thousand mutually exclusive shards. I remember speed metal, hardcore, and death metal being a few of the early shards, and I wasn't a fan of any of them. In fact, as a fan of ordinary metal, it became a lot harder to find music that I liked. Metal artists seemed to feel the need to dive extremely into one of the splinter genres (extreme seems to be what metal is about), leaving little for those of us who just liked metal. I no longer felt I had a home. What if I like Maiden, early Metallica, Megadeath, and Motorhead, but not Cannibal Corpse or Gwar, or throat singers who sound like they're vomiting their lyrics? (I know that's not really throat singing, but I don't know what to call it.) I'm so grateful Maiden never gave up, but where do they fit in the current classifications? Vanilla metal? It seems to matter because no one can ever enter the metal scene and make the kind of music I like because they're not as extreme as the more successful artists in the splinter subgenres. That's a sad loss to me.
@@beenaplumber8379 I think that Iron Maiden now falls into what's known as Progressive Metal. There's a few newer bands in a similar style that I've found- Slough Feg and Hammers of Misfortune, you might want to give them a listen and see if they're something you like.
@@beenaplumber8379Maiden were and are Heavy Metal. I do not see them being Progressive Metal (akin to bands like Dream Theater, Symphony X, Pagan's Mind, Leprous, Soen) but I can absolutely see, that Maiden heavily influenced all of those Prog Bands. Like, heavily heavily. I say that as someone who started playing guitar because of Metallica, started taking it more seriously because of Symphony X, bonded with my stepdad over Maiden's Flight 666 DVD (he is very interested in aviation, builds model planes and is also a huge Maiden fan) and who also loves more extreme forms of Metal. Although specifically not Cannibal Corpse and Gwar, their music is too brutish imo, doesn't have anything, that "pops". If we're talking extreme music, that moves me it'd be bands like Wintersun, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Synestia, Lorna Shore, Mental Cruelty.
@@beenaplumber8379 This is an interesting take tbh, as someone who's probably a metalhead from a generation after you, and grew up liking classic heavy metal, but Loving extreme metal. I'm curious about what it is exactly that you're lamenting here - is it the fact that what generally defines 70% of "metal" these days has, by and large, many extreme elements to it: growls, blastbeats, and so on? Because I can see why you'd be nostalgic: what you call "just metal", and I'd call heavy metal, Speed Metal and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal isn't 'in' the way more modern, heavier subgenres are. That kind of sound no longer defines what metal is, and it probably won't ever again. Its time came and went. It can be nodded to, paid homage to and invoked in newer acts like Ghost, but it won't be revived. And I get it. I'm sort of nostalgic for the old swedish death metal that In Flames and At the Gates used to make that was popular when I was a teen/young adult. Now that's getting on, and the artists have moved on into new things or simply waned in popularity and, arguably, their degree of inspiration and drive. What we thought was it isn't it anymore, and what's 'it' now seems new and scary: poppy, crooning vocals, R&B beats, with dj0nt guitars and breakdowns are the new popular thing? What in the VOLA and Sleep Token- But on the other hand, it's not like that stuff we like ain't out there, or that greats like Iron Maiden or Megadeath are disrespected. What if you like that kind of stuff? Well, you could listen to the modern stuff in the genre that's coming out (like BAT - Under the Crooked Claw?), or maybe give Power Metal or one of the many Progressive Metal acts a try. Those often have a less extreme edge, after all.
~6:00 on the intention of listening to a busker (or an equivalent such as a jukebox in a bar or loud car stereo driving by) i think it's possible that the intention on the listener's part to listen to something as music still plays a role in them experiencing it as such, and i think the case of a busker playing an instrument is an interesting illustration of different kinds of intention and, more broadly, different dispositions and operating assumptions which affect whether or not someone interprets something as music or not. when you get off your train and hear someone playing a violin, assuming you're familiar with the violin and the kinds of music people play on it, youre already primed to interpret whatever noises the player makes on it as music due to preconceptions; you dont have to think about it, you automatically interpret certain sound objects as music. i think there are also cases where a distinct lack of intention (to interpret a collection of sound objects as music) can be observed, such as a layperson listening to some kind of niche ambient noise piece and genuinely not realizing it's music and thusly not interpreting it as such and not having any of the experiences associated with listening to music such as listening for pitch, rhythm, harmony, etc and the changes in them. i can extend that metaphor to imagine that this layperson listening to harsh ambient noise music starts to hear variations in the textures and maybe hears some rhythmic beating or pulsing. they might very well make the connection and begin to interpret it as music, maybe theyve heard of noise music before but it isnt really at the front of their mind so it isnt their first thought upon hearing it. i think that music, existing as itself and only as itself (not as a representation of it such as notation or a physical disc) only in the moment to moment focus and attention of the listener, does require this sense of intention to be accurately called "music"; if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around it wiggles air, but it doesnt make a sound
Maybe not entirely the same point you were trying to get across, but I think a more simple way to describe it is: when I play music at max volume in my home, that's music, but when my neighbor does it on the other side of the wall, they're just disturbing the peace.
I first thought Fabbri interpretation of music was way too open and makes no sense. Then you mentioned sound of an racecar engine being music by the definition... Well you sold it to me! Also 3,5 diskette readers: I'm too young to have deep connection and subsequently real nostalgia for that sound, but it's just... perfect. Extremely pleasing rattling. That's music.
The hardest part for me with genre's as it continues, it doesn't ever seem to really communicate well what it's describing. The classification and growth of music styles and the changes that happen leaves some genre's no longer feeling accurate. It can also very narrowly define artists that have had a wider stylization throughout their career, one of the clearest I think would be The Cure. You also run into the issue of scene and style, the foundation of the 'Goth' genre, Bauhaus really was disconnected from the scene and denied the label or classification many times. Then you get the question when does Goth become Dark Wave to just in general Alternative? Genre's are to help communicate, but it seems the definition is quite nebulous and personal to make it not applicable.
I disagree, yeah the Cure didn't only make "goth" music, and this point you made about genre's not communicating well what is describing is why subgenres and microgenres were made, some Cure songs are described as darkwave, or post-punk, which is more specific than just goth. You can also stack genres together, and say a single Cure song has tinges of post-punk, goth rock, dream pop... etc.
@@kelechi_77 Right, but if you keep adding micro and sub-genres to describe niche and more niche things, you are better off communicating what the actual work is. Because what is that post-punk tinge? And is it really ever that or is it just easier to hand wave it than to actually discuss it. The more and more you stack, the initial assertion and information of genre becomes lost. It can be fun to talk of influences from scenes and that like, but in actually communicating the work, it is often to just not use genre terms.
Back in NYC reference!!! NICE! (Jeff Buckley's posthumously released cover is so electric and haunting and perfectly cares for the ideas of the original)
Honestly, I kinda like how weird genre is getting lately. It makes it more fun to see what kind of music gets labeled as what, and figuring out where certain songs fit. Is To Hell and Back straight power metal, or a fusion of Country Western and Power Metal? Where does Rebirth by Miracle of Sound fit in? Hell just looking at stuff like Babymetal or Powerman5000 can give you such genre whiplash it becomes hillarious.
But this could result in ridiculous defitions of music. ''The act of lying down, doing literally nothing, is music!'' See how ridiculous that gets? That's clearly not music. Music is inherently something to do with sound. Silence is not sound, at least not when it's not in context of music, like a rest or a break in a piece of music.
To me genre is a tool of language. How do you describe what kind of music you like? Because we all listen to a lot of types of music and like a lot of music, but what occupies most of your listening hours? For me it's indie rock, metalcore and pop punk. And that's why I don't think genres will ever die. How we communicate our preferences requires language, and what that language is needs some sort of mutual agreement to be successful. And that agreement doesn't need to go into every minutia, it can be as simple as agreeing rock uses distorted electric guitars and big loud drums. Loose agreements like that tend to work better in the long term anyway.
Genre isn't a structure or an object, it's a community. The purpose it serves is not a category for organizing music, but rather a frame of reference for the people who listen.
Heh heh, my dad was a croondog; that makes me happy. As for definitions, one of my favourites(?) is the person who defined science fiction as "what I'm pointing at when I say 'science fiction'". It's not very useful, but it does highlight the artificiality, so thanks for taking the time to explore the pitfalls and possibilities of defining music, even. I've said in the past that genres make for decent flagpoles but terrible boxes - they are only really good for saying "if you liked X, then it would be worth you checking out Y and Z which are in the same general direction".
I think what needs to die is the idea that one band has to stick to one sound forever. Ghost is a metal band (most of the time) but again, sings like Mary on a Cross are define toy pop rock.
Not to start this convo, but I'd say Ghost are primarily a hard rock band. Songs like Cirice are pretty metal, but the overaching sound is hard rock. Like, their newer stuff has definitely moved away from even classic heavy metal (not that it isn't present at all). Though I also get why people think they're a metal band. Most metal guys tend to be very strict about what is and isn't, but I notice that most people (and I kind of agree) define something as metal if it like crosses a certain heaviness threshold.
@@Billiamwoods in the spirit of full transparency, I don’t listen to ghost that often. I know a lot of their older stuff is metal but they’ve moved more towards classic/pop rock recently. My girlfriend loves ghost and claims they’re a metal band, she knows more then me about them, I trust her
@@BilliamwoodsTheir newest album has songs like Watcher In The Skies that couldn't sound any more old school heavy. Heck, Twenties is arguably the heaviest Ghost song of all. Most of the people who claim that Ghost "sold out" and "turned into a pop band" probably only ever have heard Square Hammer or He Is on the radio and excpect all of their newer songs to sound that way, which obviously isn't the case. I'm not saying you are necessarily one of these people, but those people definitely exist.
@Billiamwoods I'd say the first 3 ghost records are definitely some form of metal, although not traditionally super heavy metal, but something more in the vein of Black Sabbath or Van Halen. They would've been considered metal in the 80s and I think that's what they are aiming for. All said Scooby-Doom is still the most apt term I think
@@jameshall6399 I dunno, Infestissumam is the least heavy Ghost album in my opinion. I don't think they have necessarily changed to less metal through the years like many claim, but some of that old grit has been eroded, which is understandable.
Any time anyone mentions Berio, my mind immediately goes to Sequenza III and how Sideways referenced it/him in his Cats video. "OH YEAH DADDY THATS A REAL TOE TAPPER"
You are the first to express exactly what my definition of music is. Same goes for terms like art! It seems so fundamentally obvious to me as someone who experiences things like music and art in general.
I'm not sure I agree with a core premise of this video, namely the idea that genre is prescriptive, not descriptive. The key split for me is between culture associated with genre, and genre as an aesthetic descriptor. I agree with most of what you're saying with reference to culture that builds up around genres, but genres at their core are just descriptions of music based on what they sound similar too. I've never believed genre to be based on rules that must be followed to exist within it, because all throughout history the driving force behind music has always been to combine your influences and create something unique to yourself. As a musician my goal is never to create a song that is prescriptively part of x genre, because by doing that you're not reflecting your influences nor yourself. I don't like metal and I'm not a part of the shared culture of it, but I can't deny that the aesthetics of the genre will have shaped how I approach creating music, especially more towards the progressive end. As an example, if I'm a metalhead looking for people with a similar taste in music to me, it's useful to have a general framework to be able to search for and find people who like music that fits my aesthetic preferences. Similarly, a musician who is deep into metal culture will probably end up being heavily influenced by that culture in their own works, and that probably means that the works they create will have aesthetic similarities to metal. Having said that, I don't have to ascribe to the culture to listen to and enjoy music with the aesthetics of metal, and nor do the bands that make that music. The associated culture is not a requirement to enjoy that genre, nor is it a requirement to create that genre. In my opinion, the only thing that matters when assigning genre is how the work sounds, and the only reason that matters is to make it easier to find music that fits my aesthetic preferences. That's not to say the culture isn't relevant nor important, it absolutely is. The traditions and cultures that evolved their respective genres are instrumental in how those aesthetics evolved and are relevant to the purposes of the music. The key point here though is that to me, while a culture may be associated with a genre, a genre is not it's culture. I'd probably actually say that the culture is more important than the genre in this respect, as it gives history to the development and purpose of those aesthetics. As another example of why I think they're separate but related concepts, look at mods. The subculture isn't associated with a single musical aesthetic, the subculture itself was incredibly broad. Saying "I like mod music" doesn't really give you a good framework for what the music will sound like, and a whole host of aesthetic genres were associated with that shared culture. Soul, R&B, Ska, and Jazz all sound very aesthetically distinct, but they were all part of that shared culture. Honestly, I think the same is true of metal. While there's a clear, broad, shared subculture surrounding it, the aesthetic preferences of "Metal" as a genre are *incredibly* varied, to the point where saying "I like Metal" is practically meaningless. I think the key difficulty with defining genre is that the word tends to be used for both. I'd personally split them, with genre being an aesthetic descriptor only and another term to describe subcultures that build up around certain shared musical practices.
On the idea of defining music: how important is sound, really? I can't imagine that the deaf experience of music... isn't. I remember hearing Eastman's _The Holy Presence of Joan of Arc_ (a ~20m piece for like 10? 11?-entirely too many-cellos). It stopped me in my tracks and had me questioning "what is music?". In retrospect, it was more of "do I enjoy this?", but it was such a fascinating experience for me that I love to share it. I've never heard a piece of "traditional" music I'd describe as"challenging" before. -- It's hard to pick a favorite doodle today. Mr. Peabody was a throw (way) back. I laughed out loud at the ape. Spacechem had me double take, but I'm pretty sure I've seen you use it at least once before. AIM wins the biggest nostalgia hit (and makes me feel old; thanks).
I love this discussion on a deep, visceral level that I don't know adequately describe. I think the same argument exists in even the broader "art" community [Citation Needed]. .... like... the reference to `Music for Airports` (and the humanist implications of the fact that this very ... niche?... thing not only does this exist, but it is something /we/ are talking about nearly half a century after it was written) is exactly the thing...
"Sound organised by a sentient being or beings." Is probably my favorite way to describe or define music because it allows for the organisational conflict between performer and audience or audience members. Meaning the context of the listener or performer puts on the sounds is as important as the presence or absence of sound.
@@AFastidiousCuber I think the creation and placement of the aeolian harp counts as organising the sound because it's purposefully using the wind to cause it
@@cuckoobrain7999 If waves crashing against a shore randomly produced a melody and you heard it, would it not be appropriate to say "The waves made music"? My point is just, I think who/what created the music is irrelevant.
@@AFastidiousCuber no, recording and presenting those crashing waves makes it music. The defining of the sounds is itself the process of creating the music. You've decorated time with sound, period. It matters not what you used to do so. Popular definition is just "music we, generally, value, we will call Music (big M)".
It's interesting to hear file sharing cited as a reason for the decline in front line music sales, because the last I looked into that explanation was an invention of music publishing to justify increasingly harsh penalties, and increasingly invasion technical protection measures. I've not checked on the literature for years, but in the heyday of limewire the industry's assertions were flatly unsupported by any evidence. In fact, I'd even say that the publishing industry's response to filesharing (especially their abortive war on format shifting and their increasing reliance on selling the same product over and over again) did more damage to their sales than the filesharing itself did!
genre is most useful as a framework for organizing musical history. its fascinating how the importance between geography, demographic, and the exchange of musical ideas weaves everything together. most disagreements about genre i hear seem to come from people having differences in opinion on how important any of those aspects are - is detroit techno limited only to detroit? an artist in berlin making nearly the same sound was still making something labelled differently. the primary difference in queercore and hardcore at large is demographic and image, but it's an essential part of punk history. it's also weird in the modern day - a microgenre (like many branches of vaporwave) might just be a bunch of friends in a private discord server going after the same idea to start, but now physical geography and traditional demographics don't matter. imo truly caring about genre in a non-prescriptive way is just caring about history
The most reflexive pop song is probably Sly & the Family Stone's "Dance to the Music." Whatever the lyrics say is repeated by the instruments afterward.
Biz Markie was one of the first rappers we all heard on popular radio. Our parents and teachers hated him singing out of tune, and that made us love him even more. It was a mild form of rebellion.
I think its best to think of genre as a venn diagram. Its always been that way, and people have always been putting them together, obviously, as there are so many fusion genres. Id even argue fusion is the main cause of new genres forming. Its just that recently, people have been fusing genres so often that alot of music is a very open feild with much less fences up to keep genres separate than there were before. When the divide is so hatd to find, it can be easy to say that concept of a genre is gone, but instead it is still there, but has become a spectrum. The reason this has happened is because metal is pushing heavier and heavier over the years, thats what it does. In response, hard rock got softer in general and combined with digital production was leaning closer to pop music than ever before. This also made a gap in between of things that aren't quite either, eg ghost. So this whole thing is pushing genres closer together and creating grey areas over the years, and especially with digital production, bands started experimenting over it and now in the modern day the lines that seperate genres are so blurred that they become near impossible to see sometimes, but just because they arent as easy to categorize doesn't mean the genres aren't there. Damn thats my nights worth of waffling done right there dont know why i wrote a 10 paragraph essay there but there it is.
The definition given here of a genre reminds me of art movements. Then I went to the wikipedia article for art movement and got my confirmation. Genre = Art movement. So genre die as much as art movement do: They are temporal constructs; when no more people participate in them, they die. It's normal and fine.
I can burp the german national anthem... top notch musical performance! On another note: The wildest mix/clash of genre fans I ever encountered was at a Babymetal concert. I mean, I knew that all kid of people listen to them, but was not prepared for the reality of it. From the biggest and buffest metal dudes to early teenagers accompanied by parents/grandparents (who probably were not knowing what they had gotten themselves into)... Everybody got along quite good, apparently, but it still is one of the weirdest experiences I had at a concert.
What, you have done here. Is, absolutely perfect! I'm really, really picky. With, what I appreciate. Concerning, OUR place, upon,our planetary placement. We, are really 'funny' monkeys!
The genres I make are more based around topic and community than sound (wizard rock, which is not actually all rock, and filk, which is not all a variation on folk), so I appreciate acknowledging those can be factors in what makes a genre. A playlist in either of those genres may sound like it's all over the place in terms of more common genre labels, but it's still all one genre, just one that relies on different connections. Having a genre label helps in finding those connections, and the diverse sounds are just part of the fun.
My definition of music is “any form of sound which is either perceived as music or designed with the intention to be music.” So if something sounds musical to you, then it is music. If someone creates noise with the intention of it being music, it is music. It’s a bit extreme, but idk, I think it serves my brain well haha
To be that guy, what if (just for example) you were to drop dome cutlery by accident on two or more different surfaces, and you heard a melody produced by that. Would that still be musical because the melody occurred from an event that wasn't intentional? Like does the intention for music lay in the production or the reception? Like I say I'm just riffing a bit and I genuinely would like to know what you think, not trying start an argument cause :)
@@tomjones1506 well I personally don’t think that music exists outside of the living beings that are able to perceive and create it. That’s why I put all of the power in the hands of humans, for if there was no being capable of applying meaning to noise, then the noise would have no meaning outside of it merely being a noise. Humans have the ability to categorize noise as music, and without that arbitrary categorization given to noise by intelligent beings, the sound is just a sound.
Indeed, I've always found it a little baffling when people say, for example, birds sing to each other; and of course to us they do - but do birds think they sing? I would argue no (cue silly mental images of birds actually saying "OI! OI... STEVE!!)
@@maxalaintwo3578 definitions can be cyclical because definitions are social constructs. We make the rules for them, and if I decide that’s what music is to me, then that’s what music is to me. Music is much more than some sort of rigidly defined term, it is an entirely fluid experience that cannot be placed in a box, and trying to do so is limiting to the form.
As someone who started making original music in 2019, this goes a long way towards explaining why it's hard for me to talk about the genres of the music I make. I am neither in a scene which defines itself by genre, nor being guided to marketability by a label who profits from being able to tell Borders which rack to put my CDs on, and that means that I have to reverse-engineer the unconscious musical inspirations I brought to the work to even guess.
In the early part of this video with the question of whether Mumford and Sons was metal, I was fully expecting commentary around the first metal Grammy being awarded to Jethro Tull.
I often find these kinds of videos difficult since I don't experience much internalization of external phenomenon, but this was good. I do find it strange though how talks about music and genera rarely delve into the subjective post-hoc nature of the generation of shared definitions in general. If one samples a billion people about a billion songs and their classifications (without use of genera words so as to avoid priming effects) the emergent categories (false latent variables) will be different even with longitudinal testing of the same sample; and one would likely expect some correlation with individual affect (current mood state) in the subjective reporting that is being used to create the aggregate. Likewise, the subjective genera (goal) reporting of the creators/artists are unlikely to match the subjective genera reporting (individual or aggregate) of the listeners as time from creation to point of sample approaches infinity.... Sorry, I fell down an OCD tangent for a moment - back to watching videos.
Could you someday do a video on Radioheads Street Spirit, Husker Dü's hardly getting over it, or similarly depressive songs? Take a picture by Filter would also be goated.
"To me, music is anything people experience as musical." ¡Yes! I often (although not always) experience the sound of a washer or dryer or the train going through the BART tubes between San Francisco and Oakland as music.
I doubt you'll ever see this, but could you please please please do a video on will wood 👉👈 also as a guitarist and drummer currently learning music theory, I gotta say, your videos really motivate me to learn more, I love the content!!❤❤❤
My first thought on the importance of "genre" was by how marketing was done in the U.S., and you nailed it by the fact that there was music for and by black people, and music for and by white people. Those people lived in the same places but got different record deals, played different venues, and the music flourished in its own ways. 21st century listeners have less obstacles in finding and liking the music they do.
Definitions? For what it’s worth, if ever sharing it helps in any way, I’d like to go like this: Music : sounds organized, with any degree of intentionality, for the sake of the listening and/or performing experience. Then by extension: the art of / activity consisting of organizing or producing such sounds. Musical genre: a set of social behaviors involving, but not limited to, musical activity. Thoughts ?
I wonder if it’s possible to intentionally organize sounds to make a “sound piece”/“sound experience” without considering it music. In the sense the artist doesn’t consider it to be music and rather an experiment Or poetry that emphasizes the sonical aspects (like the reading of it)
The best definition I have heard for music was in a Music Exploration course ( looking at the history, primarily of European music, with references and comparisons with other music) The definition was designed to include music that doesn’t sound like music to everybody: Music is a series of sounds and silences intended to be music. ( I believe you can include bird and whale song in that definition)
I really hate genre definitions in general but I liked your vid. I get it. I grew up as a punk rock kid so now pop-punk as a definition really rubs me wrong. I wish my old friend Steve could watch this one. He was a philosophy master and contemplated existence. Unfortunately, he’s no longer with us. He was an excellent drummer.😊
1:33 wait hold the hecking phone is it a golden strawberry i now need to know if you have more than me can we get a sick montage of 12tone collecting strawberries
As a car nerd, Nascar races being used as an example of how daunting Fabbri's definition is was immediately hilarious because for car nerds, gearheads, petrol heads, motorsports fans, etc. those roaring engine sounds are not just music but quintessential to the experience of car culture. To the point that huge swaths of the backlash against electric vehicles is the lack of sound. And there isn't just a backlash to the quietness of EVs, but the inauthenticity of the exhaust notes of recentish sports cars. Brands have taken to piping the sounds of a car's engine into the sound system of the vehicle. Presumably as some kind of compromise between a modern vehicle's need to be luxurious, and quiet and pleasant, but also to appease to the seemingly brutish demand for loud exhausts. But enthusiast owners of these cars often take to disconnecting these systems, because, as a driver, the appeal of that noise isn't simply emotive, its informative, almost tactile. If the sounds the car makes are in any way faked, be it simply shoving a microphone inside the engine bay to make the sound louder, or possibly outright faking the noise, that information is no longer accurate and therefore isn't useful. It is also something someone who simply uses a car as a tool to get from point a to point b would never give a shit about because most people don't listen to their car for anything other than bad noises, and even then usually can't identify them. If that isn't music, and being a part of a music sub-culture, I don't fucking know what is.
i like the definition that does not need music to be sound, as far as i know there is sign language music but well, then we can argue about differences between poetry and singing, even among spoken langauge cultures
I think music is a collection of pitches used in a rhythmic pattern designed to express an idea or emotion. Before I explain genre, instrumentation is the collection of instruments used to create music. Genre is the style, and typically instrumentation, of which music is presented, usually defined by the idea or emotion being expressed
Things are often best described not by what they are, but what they are not, and a definition that describes everything, describes nothing. Definitions gain meaning through what they exclude. This is why circular definitions are bad: they fail to describe the exclusions.
I think genre is also determined by where the music is performed, who the band is in relation to other bands and their intermeshing audiences. The concept is both general and specific.This is why listening in to different musical scenes in a historical fashion can be a better indicator of style whereas genre tends to be more of a mish-mash catch-all term. I think it is more a product of place and time as well who collaborated with who during the period of time that the artist was active.
The thing with genres is that there are generally three different aspects You have the community based ones where it’s less defined by sound and moreso by its history and its community. Like the canterbury scene for example. It’s just straight up prog. It’s considered its own genre but if you played a song, i couldnt tell you it originated from canterbury There are genres based on an idea. Like avant-garde or progressive or whatever. You dont need a specific sound to be avant garde or progressive. Why it could range from goliath by the mars volta to histoire sans parole by harmonium And the most known one is genre based on music/sound/themes. Like conventions or whatnot. Odd meters, swing, specific instruments etc Im probably missing others
Ima be real with you as a 30 year old that's been in and out of bands, writing and recording, and living in the metal internet scene for 20 years I don't really think this is the case anymore unless you're literally my dad being weird about it. Like literally Tom Araya isn't even elitist about metal. Most of the time, metal elitism is shunned vehemently.
@@hend0wskiThat depends on what space you're in, for sure. Testament concert? Nobody except the boomers cares. Finnish war metal show? Funny looks are the /nice/ outcome. Tech-death? Caring about the genres might get you a lecture from a turbo nerd if you get it wrong.
@@g3intel no, wait this is actually too real stop I'm having ptsd of a dude with coke can glasses yelling at me through his headgear about why these specific sweep picks aren't actually math rock.. but foreal, yeah it's for sure an issue in places but on the whole I'd say being weird about metal elitism is on its way out of the culture for sure yaknow?
Just realized that "Fight me, Polyphonic" has the same syllables as "Rock me, Amadeus", so now I have that song with new lyrics going through my head.
...and your comment just got the parody of that song, "Jabba, on the Dais" stuck in my head. 😅
@@davidg5898 I was also thinking of "Dr Zaius, Dr Zaius" scene from the Planet of the Apes musical in The Simpsons. (Best parody musical... ever!)
they have similar rhymeschemes too, lol
@@scuttlefield Starring Troy McClure, who you may remember from such films as... 🤣
ₚₒₗᵧphonic ₚₒₗᵧᵖʰᵒⁿᶦᶜ, ₚₒₗᵧᵖʰᵒⁿᶦᶜ
ₚₒₗᵧphonic ₚₒₗᵧᵖʰᵒⁿᶦᶜ, ₚₒₗᵧᵖʰᵒⁿᶦᶜ
ₚₒₗᵧphonic ₚₒₗᵧᵖʰᵒⁿᶦᶜ, ₒₕ ₒₕ polyphonic
come and fight me, polyphonic
The use of a bored ape under “obsolete” is amazing shade and I’m here for it.
I also love the use of Waldorf and Stadler from The Muppet Show to represent "criticism".
He also used it for mas-
_how the frick do I word this?_
When I stopped viewing genre as a description of the musical mechanics at play and instead a marker of community, the lines made a lot more sense to me
That's flatly ridiculous, though. The community is a result of the shared experience of the mechanics, not the cause.
@@farkasmactavish and yet no community can actually concretely define what those mechanics are, so clearly there's more to it than that.
@@themement3616 That's because they're not in the business of analyzing mysic from an academic perspective.
@@farkasmactavish
Genres are a form of categorization used primarily by average people. They are informed by and defined by the masses. What academics think of them is not all that relevant because their understanding is not the recognized consensus.
@@danielflanard8274 That's like saying that cultures are a categorization used by average people that are informed and decided by the masses.
No. Genres are categories which can be studied and defined.
Is there overlap sometimes? Sure! One of the few differences between heavy metal and classical is the instruments; the chord progression, time signatures, and other composition choices are incredibly similar, which is why it's so easy and common to create cover versions of songs from each genre into the other.
But that doesn't mean "Genre is, like, made up, _maaaan!"_
"If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, is that a sick beat?"
a _stick_ beat.
@@that44rdv4rk best reply
It might have been a sick tree
Yeah, 7:16... ❤🔥
"No!"
The thing about "by definition, everything is music" is that it's kind of underscored by the running joke of "drone/ambient fan spends 15 minutes entranced by a new song they later discover is a piece of industrial machinery running in the background", which while very funny does actually happen sometimes in my experience, meaning that in a way music is defined by our capacity to enjoy it as music, and if you expand that capacity the scope of what can be considered expands with it.
Like I have unironically sat down and enjoyed the sound of a generator running. it's like listening to birdsong, but for fans of underground metal.
Andrew Huang does a series where he gathers some music producers together to make original tracks or remixes all based on a single shared sample. The sample is usually a snippet of an existing song, but ro this day, my favorite episode of that series is the one where their sample was just a recording of a door closing. But the thing is, the reason that recording exists is because someone heard it and thought it sounded musical, and it does! And a lot of the tracks made from it keep or are inspired by that song the door was singing. Stuff like that is awesome, man.
Have you ever listened to the album "Music For Living Sound" by Yann Tomita? listening to that album has genuinely redefined my concept for what music can be
I genuinely love that washing machine that sounds like some Jumanji beat
Wasn’t a particular note progression from Hamilton from a squeaky door?
It's surprising and sad to realize how easily someone can be amused 😢
The reports of Genre's death were ... greatly exaggerated
"I've been dead. It's quite liberating."
Pronounced "John-Ray"
How could you, I just posted this quote and you beat me to it
But what about Trans-Nutritional Green Death Country Rythm & Blues?
Love the intelligent discourse on the subject. One thing that I think is important to keep in mind is that genre labels, though arising from a simple human impulse to discuss & classify artistic nuance & idiosyncrasies, has largely been historically used as a tool of classist oppression (pre-recorded music), & later a method of advertising & commodifying recorded music as a tool of the recording industry, which exists largely to propagate & justify it's own existence. & I think we can all agree that it's best for art & those who make it to not normalize anything that mainly exists to commodify it... Right?
This feels like the start of a split in youtube music theory discourse akin to how literary academics started infighting in the 20th century to eventually create a bigger picture surrounding literature
"it's about the history!" "it's about the structure!" "It's about the artist!" "It's about the music itself!" "It's about the listener!" "It's about people!" "It's about society!" "Ok maybe it's about history again?!"
It is funny, because as a theorist I often talked with my literary Theory friends and explain to them that we are basically having the same conversation they had years ago. It makes me sad, but I'm also glad we're finally having these conversations
I dunno it's more a battle between people who don't want to read and dissect existing literature and those who do. The whole crux of the video hinges on how Polyphonic decided not to read and dissect the paper (and to respond to the general existing literature and opinion).
You don't have to "be an academic" to read papers. Honestly not really sure why Polyphonic chose to engage with Fabbri in the first place if it's quickly sidelined. It bothers me because it's a form of willful ignorance that is common in other parts of modern life
Holy shit, the NFT ape representing the idea of obsoleteness followed by "I'll get off my soapbox" was... beautiful. Art. Well played.
Beavis and Butthead perfectly defined metal back in the early 90's: "drums, guitars, and death! They finally got it right!"
What about sunn o)))
@@Passage-atx sunn o))) is good but super pretentious
@@Passage-atx=)))))
Ah, yes, the Fabri Paper. It played a big part in my master thesis. I applied it to Nu Metal to show how genres might influence each other. So, I strongly believe we need genre for context, to put a piece of music into relation to other ones and find out the nuance of compositional techniques in a piece of music. After all, no piece of music exists on its own, always in an environment with other pieces. To draw the lines of relationships through genre can help to see stylistic devices and how they develop. Again, Nu Metal is a great example of that.
...
Thanks for the video to put the gerne discussion into perspective.
I haven’t been in a mosh pit in a decade, but if one broke out of the symphony, I would absolutely jump in
Pogo to that timpani drum.
Those first performances of The Rite Of Spring...I could see one there. Mozart would have loved a mosh pit.
Ngl I think there's a reason to differentiate between abstract hip-hop and rage, or pop rock and stoner rock, or chamber-pop and dance-pop, and if I'm being recommended an artist I would want to know which one they belong to more.
To me genre is a way to describe a song to somebody who hasn't heard the song before
I dont really agree cause if i told you “histoire sans paroles is a prog piece”, you wouldnt really get what it sounds like. Especially when genres get so specific that the average person doesnt know them
I prefer using genres as a way to build a community of people with similar taste and most importantly, find new music.
Once you get into the “greats” of a genre, you can find other important artists of that genre and other artists inspired by them and enjoy stuff
When music historians look back on this year this beef will surely overshadow the Kendrick/Drake beef.
Who is kendrick and who is drake?
@@tolkienfan1972 what does bbl even mean?
@@tolkienfan1972Kendrick Lamar is a cool rapper type dude who got really famous for making good music and carrying on the legacy of Hip-Hop. Drake is an attention-hungry content creator who thrives on drama, divisiveness, ironic homophobia, and ridiculous meme-like behaviors.
@@tolkienfan1972Literally me. Well, actually I know them but I don’t care enough to learn about their beef lol
Finally someone else joins Noah and I's neverending debate about genre.. super appreciate the shoutout!!!
I think this piece was missing a deeper discussion of genre as an artifact of the sharing/selling of music/musical performances. It was addressed tangentially, but genres act as a way for music to be marketed and for audiences to find what they are looking for, a sort of less rigid Dewey decimal system for media. Some genres are entirely created or maintained for that purpose. Plenty of "Christmas songs" have no mention of Christmas in them. "Kids' music" can be as varied as a genre can be and is defined purely by target audience. Absent the role of genres in creating and experiencing media, they will always fundamentally arise from and be reinforced by needing a way to discuss it.
More lines might be drawn and the lines people care about might change, but the lines will always be there and be important.
I want there to be a musical genre of UNeasy listening.
@@MonkeyJedi99 We need something that conveniently and casually lumps Peter Brötzmann, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Ligeti together :D
He does talk about genre being tied to marketing by the big labels over the last century, a practice supposedly dying out. The big labels may be on the ropes, but I don't see the notion of genre in any way fading. It's still used in its traditional sense to define, channel, or instigate music creation; to mark one's tastes and cultural allegiances; and to both market and seek out music that's similar to music X. It feels like he was just waiting to plug Nebula. Sponsored/affiliate videos are the bane of RUclips :(
@@SO-ym3zs I have zero idea who they are, but I support your enthusiasm!
@@MonkeyJedi99 You may not know him by name, but you've almost certainly heard music by Ligeti: one of his works is used as the "sound effect" that the obelisk makes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
When I was in high school, we were arguing that genres are dying and music discussions often delved into micro-genres.
When I went back to university, after a ~10 year break, I would chuckle to myself as I heard students at the coffee shops and on the quad arguing that genres are dying and hearing them discuss music in terms of micro-genres.
Roughly 10 years later, I'm now watching this video response about whether genres are dying and how relevant micro-genres are.
Long story short? Genres evolve, there's a lot of interaction between genres, and every generation thinks they're the ones that broke it all.* 😆
*Case in point, and exactly as you said approaching the end about new music being a re-envisioning of music people grew up with from their parents, "modern no-wave" is pretty much first wave industrial but with more defined rhythm and better production values. (Think mid/late 70s to mid 80s, with Throbbing Gristle as the archetype.)
I haven't finished the video yet, but so far I suspect this has a lot to do with the divide between the ways people actually use language and the ways that some select academics would like language to be used, and then the academics forget that they don't dictate how language forms so they get confused and frustrated that the rest of the world isn't playing along.
Mosh pits at the symphony would be the bomb 😆
The Rite of Spring was a trailblazer in more ways than one
@@maxalaintwo3578 ...and now I want lumpy Fantasia dinosaur costumes in the mosh pit.
As with many, many things in life, genres are rigid boxes into which humans try to categorize unique items. Some items fit cleanly within the bounds of a single box, but some inevitably turn out fuzzier than the model is prepared to deal with, and that's a failing of the model, not of the item. Ask a planetary geologist how to identify a planet, asteroid, or moon. Ask a geneticist what a species is. Ask a sociologist about gender. You'll inevitably end up with some variation on, "Hoo boy... well, it's complicated." And so with genre.
Gender isn’t complicated lmao
@@maxalaintwo3578 Thanks for the uninformed opinion, lastname lotsofnumbers!
@@AubriGryphon Being informed is exactly what led me to my conclusion, AubriGryphon lol. I don’t make the rules
@@maxalaintwo3578as a sociology major, no. genders definition isn’t too complicated, but then you add gender identity, gender presentation, sex (also a social construct, but a story for another day), how gender varies by culture, etc, and it gets complicated pretty quickly
@@chesspiece4257 yeah allat’s a made up concept from the 50s by dudes like John Money and Alfred Kinsey, who performed entirely unethical and unscientific experiments to thinly justify their fetishes. Look up John Money experiments when you have the time, and bring a vomit bag with you. The only reason it’s made complicated now it to accommodate for modern sexual deviancy without people feeling rightfully bad
to me genres have turned more into descriptive building blocks of musical practices, culture and sounds the piece may contain rather than a description of the musical experience as a whole.
In a way genres are more similar to how tempo and time signature describe a song than a description of the song's identity as a whole. One can describe an entire song all the way through, but also they're free to change at any point.
Genres are even more flexible as multiple can overlap at the exact same time without issue.
That's what genre has always been, it's also why it kills me when the anti-genre ppl go off on genres as some kind of gatekeeping/elitism tactic because that was literally never what genre has been.
What would a genre put through A.I. devoid of all of the other building blocks look like?
@@StoryTeller796 Awful, that's what it would look like, regardless of which genre you choose
@@felafnirelek8987 I do not doubt it one bit.
As an album-oriented rock guy, I've always seen genres more like family trees, where you can trace individual ideas in the songs/albums/artists style to those who came before, that create the genre.
Not the beef I was expecting in 2024 but I'm here for it
Kendrick vs Drake ain't got nothing on this
As a diehard video game music enjoyer, boss battle is a huge genre, JRPG forest is a specific genre, ice level is a pretty big genre, and I could go on. I might not know the proper names of these genres, but I can tell they're different genres.
I am a fan of JRPG battle music (which can be adjacent to prog rock because some of the prominent games pull from that), so yes video game music is music, has genres, and is comparable to better recognized genres.
Two of my favourite music RUclipsrs have a podcast together and no one told me? Shame upon you all and specially on me for not listening to it sooner
I think a huge component of "the demise of genre" are people people like me who grew up with MTV (back when they played music). They played rock, pop, rap, R&B, prog, etc. There are quite a few from my generation who were into both Hip Hop and Metal which probably wouldn't have happened earlier (just look at the folk/rock rivalry in the 60's or the hatred of disco and rise of punk in the 70's). Heck, now that the male country artists have stopped trying to sound like Garth Brooks and have gotten creative again, even the country vs rock barrier is eroding.
Modern pop country pretty much is late nineties/early aughts top 40 post-grunge rock with a twangy accent. In some cases quite literally such as Darius Rucker and Aaron Lewis. Which I think is an oft overlooked aspect in the decline of rock, the demo that in previous generations would be the dudebro butt rock fans are now country fans.
Genre really is just a set of expectations. Expectations flow and drift. If you subvert expectations enough, your expectations will adapt. Expectations are equally useful for describing a song or band to someone who's unfamiliar, and to record labels and other corporations looking for an audience to market their product to. As someone who buys a plurality of their music from Bandcamp and grabs another portion from Soundcloud, I am extremely interested to see where expectations go in the future, as we drift farther and farther away from corporate record labels (while hopefully avoiding the death of variety induced by a flattening algorithm - equally scary).
The very concept of controversy and civil disagreement is a good thing. I'm a fan of both you and Polyphonic, so I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
I feel like the controversy is actually around the willingness to read academic papers. If Polyphonic actually read the paper with the necessary effort (you don't need to "be an academic") then this disagreement would be a much lesser thing
In my opinion genre can be used as a guideline and it can be a useful tool, but at the same time, Genre isn’t a hard and fast end all be all objective descriptor. It’s not like a super specific scientific classification, it’s more fluid and nebulous.
Especially when you don't want to call certain music "race records" anymore
The idea that genre is a culture is still there, it’s just more grouped together. I’m in high school, the alt kids or kids who would’ve been considered emo 15 or so years ago now are not defined by emo, but they also listen to a lot of punk, Nu metal, alt rock, etc.
Perhaps one sign of the power of genres is what happens when a piece flouts the genre's conventions. For example Iris DeMent's "Wasteland of the Free" has most of the elements of a Nashville country song (instrumentation, chord progression, emotional lyrical delivery etc.) - save for the radical social critique of the lyrics that left me (for one) pretty stunned on first hearing.
As a person in my 30s genre is how I used to sort vibes on my mp3 library. I was suprised to hear how much socially fitting is in your definition of genre. I have never really cared if I used the right language when talking about music I like but then again I dont make music theory videos.
Me? Don't mind me, I'm just sitting here in the comments section with popcorn, waiting for the reactions when someone calls "Black Metal," "Death Metal" by accident.
Blackened death metal
(Sorry this became a WoW, but I get emotional about this. And your comment was in fun. Sorry!) I used to feel comfortable calling myself a metalhead when that meant Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, King Diamond, Savatage - the earlier days. Metal was all you needed to say. Sure, there were huge differences (in hindsight) between Judas Priest and Savatage, but there were huge differences between Johnny Cash and Johnny Paycheck, though both were country.
When hair bands ruled the airwaves in the late 80s, all was good, except for metalheads who couldn't stand the thought of following mainstream popular music. As soon as the hair bands were displaced by grunge and hip hop, it seemed metal was smashed into a thousand mutually exclusive shards. I remember speed metal, hardcore, and death metal being a few of the early shards, and I wasn't a fan of any of them. In fact, as a fan of ordinary metal, it became a lot harder to find music that I liked. Metal artists seemed to feel the need to dive extremely into one of the splinter genres (extreme seems to be what metal is about), leaving little for those of us who just liked metal. I no longer felt I had a home. What if I like Maiden, early Metallica, Megadeath, and Motorhead, but not Cannibal Corpse or Gwar, or throat singers who sound like they're vomiting their lyrics? (I know that's not really throat singing, but I don't know what to call it.)
I'm so grateful Maiden never gave up, but where do they fit in the current classifications? Vanilla metal? It seems to matter because no one can ever enter the metal scene and make the kind of music I like because they're not as extreme as the more successful artists in the splinter subgenres. That's a sad loss to me.
@@beenaplumber8379 I think that Iron Maiden now falls into what's known as Progressive Metal. There's a few newer bands in a similar style that I've found- Slough Feg and Hammers of Misfortune, you might want to give them a listen and see if they're something you like.
@@beenaplumber8379Maiden were and are Heavy Metal. I do not see them being Progressive Metal (akin to bands like Dream Theater, Symphony X, Pagan's Mind, Leprous, Soen) but I can absolutely see, that Maiden heavily influenced all of those Prog Bands. Like, heavily heavily.
I say that as someone who started playing guitar because of Metallica, started taking it more seriously because of Symphony X, bonded with my stepdad over Maiden's Flight 666 DVD (he is very interested in aviation, builds model planes and is also a huge Maiden fan) and who also loves more extreme forms of Metal. Although specifically not Cannibal Corpse and Gwar, their music is too brutish imo, doesn't have anything, that "pops". If we're talking extreme music, that moves me it'd be bands like Wintersun, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Synestia, Lorna Shore, Mental Cruelty.
@@beenaplumber8379 This is an interesting take tbh, as someone who's probably a metalhead from a generation after you, and grew up liking classic heavy metal, but Loving extreme metal. I'm curious about what it is exactly that you're lamenting here - is it the fact that what generally defines 70% of "metal" these days has, by and large, many extreme elements to it: growls, blastbeats, and so on?
Because I can see why you'd be nostalgic: what you call "just metal", and I'd call heavy metal, Speed Metal and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal isn't 'in' the way more modern, heavier subgenres are. That kind of sound no longer defines what metal is, and it probably won't ever again. Its time came and went. It can be nodded to, paid homage to and invoked in newer acts like Ghost, but it won't be revived.
And I get it. I'm sort of nostalgic for the old swedish death metal that In Flames and At the Gates used to make that was popular when I was a teen/young adult. Now that's getting on, and the artists have moved on into new things or simply waned in popularity and, arguably, their degree of inspiration and drive. What we thought was it isn't it anymore, and what's 'it' now seems new and scary: poppy, crooning vocals, R&B beats, with dj0nt guitars and breakdowns are the new popular thing? What in the VOLA and Sleep Token-
But on the other hand, it's not like that stuff we like ain't out there, or that greats like Iron Maiden or Megadeath are disrespected. What if you like that kind of stuff? Well, you could listen to the modern stuff in the genre that's coming out (like BAT - Under the Crooked Claw?), or maybe give Power Metal or one of the many Progressive Metal acts a try. Those often have a less extreme edge, after all.
~6:00 on the intention of listening to a busker (or an equivalent such as a jukebox in a bar or loud car stereo driving by)
i think it's possible that the intention on the listener's part to listen to something as music still plays a role in them experiencing it as such, and i think the case of a busker playing an instrument is an interesting illustration of different kinds of intention and, more broadly, different dispositions and operating assumptions which affect whether or not someone interprets something as music or not.
when you get off your train and hear someone playing a violin, assuming you're familiar with the violin and the kinds of music people play on it, youre already primed to interpret whatever noises the player makes on it as music due to preconceptions; you dont have to think about it, you automatically interpret certain sound objects as music.
i think there are also cases where a distinct lack of intention (to interpret a collection of sound objects as music) can be observed, such as a layperson listening to some kind of niche ambient noise piece and genuinely not realizing it's music and thusly not interpreting it as such and not having any of the experiences associated with listening to music such as listening for pitch, rhythm, harmony, etc and the changes in them.
i can extend that metaphor to imagine that this layperson listening to harsh ambient noise music starts to hear variations in the textures and maybe hears some rhythmic beating or pulsing. they might very well make the connection and begin to interpret it as music, maybe theyve heard of noise music before but it isnt really at the front of their mind so it isnt their first thought upon hearing it.
i think that music, existing as itself and only as itself (not as a representation of it such as notation or a physical disc) only in the moment to moment focus and attention of the listener, does require this sense of intention to be accurately called "music"; if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around it wiggles air, but it doesnt make a sound
Maybe not entirely the same point you were trying to get across, but I think a more simple way to describe it is: when I play music at max volume in my home, that's music, but when my neighbor does it on the other side of the wall, they're just disturbing the peace.
Sleep Token covering Hey Ya was when I actually listened to the lyrics and was surprised it was the same song as the upbeat track from OutKast
I first thought Fabbri interpretation of music was way too open and makes no sense.
Then you mentioned sound of an racecar engine being music by the definition... Well you sold it to me!
Also 3,5 diskette readers: I'm too young to have deep connection and subsequently real nostalgia for that sound, but it's just... perfect. Extremely pleasing rattling. That's music.
The hardest part for me with genre's as it continues, it doesn't ever seem to really communicate well what it's describing. The classification and growth of music styles and the changes that happen leaves some genre's no longer feeling accurate. It can also very narrowly define artists that have had a wider stylization throughout their career, one of the clearest I think would be The Cure. You also run into the issue of scene and style, the foundation of the 'Goth' genre, Bauhaus really was disconnected from the scene and denied the label or classification many times. Then you get the question when does Goth become Dark Wave to just in general Alternative? Genre's are to help communicate, but it seems the definition is quite nebulous and personal to make it not applicable.
I disagree, yeah the Cure didn't only make "goth" music, and this point you made about genre's not communicating well what is describing is why subgenres and microgenres were made, some Cure songs are described as darkwave, or post-punk, which is more specific than just goth. You can also stack genres together, and say a single Cure song has tinges of post-punk, goth rock, dream pop... etc.
@@kelechi_77 Right, but if you keep adding micro and sub-genres to describe niche and more niche things, you are better off communicating what the actual work is. Because what is that post-punk tinge? And is it really ever that or is it just easier to hand wave it than to actually discuss it. The more and more you stack, the initial assertion and information of genre becomes lost. It can be fun to talk of influences from scenes and that like, but in actually communicating the work, it is often to just not use genre terms.
Back in NYC reference!!! NICE! (Jeff Buckley's posthumously released cover is so electric and haunting and perfectly cares for the ideas of the original)
Honestly, I kinda like how weird genre is getting lately. It makes it more fun to see what kind of music gets labeled as what, and figuring out where certain songs fit. Is To Hell and Back straight power metal, or a fusion of Country Western and Power Metal? Where does Rebirth by Miracle of Sound fit in? Hell just looking at stuff like Babymetal or Powerman5000 can give you such genre whiplash it becomes hillarious.
Anything that's considered to be music by at least one person is music
i like this one
But this could result in ridiculous defitions of music. ''The act of lying down, doing literally nothing, is music!'' See how ridiculous that gets? That's clearly not music. Music is inherently something to do with sound. Silence is not sound, at least not when it's not in context of music, like a rest or a break in a piece of music.
@@NBrixH any sound thats considered to be music by at least one person
@@greedo69 that I can follow
@@NBrixH John Cage "4' 33"". It is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence and is considered to be a musical composition.
To me genre is a tool of language. How do you describe what kind of music you like? Because we all listen to a lot of types of music and like a lot of music, but what occupies most of your listening hours? For me it's indie rock, metalcore and pop punk. And that's why I don't think genres will ever die. How we communicate our preferences requires language, and what that language is needs some sort of mutual agreement to be successful. And that agreement doesn't need to go into every minutia, it can be as simple as agreeing rock uses distorted electric guitars and big loud drums. Loose agreements like that tend to work better in the long term anyway.
Genre isn't a structure or an object, it's a community. The purpose it serves is not a category for organizing music, but rather a frame of reference for the people who listen.
Heh heh, my dad was a croondog; that makes me happy. As for definitions, one of my favourites(?) is the person who defined science fiction as "what I'm pointing at when I say 'science fiction'". It's not very useful, but it does highlight the artificiality, so thanks for taking the time to explore the pitfalls and possibilities of defining music, even. I've said in the past that genres make for decent flagpoles but terrible boxes - they are only really good for saying "if you liked X, then it would be worth you checking out Y and Z which are in the same general direction".
I think what needs to die is the idea that one band has to stick to one sound forever. Ghost is a metal band (most of the time) but again, sings like Mary on a Cross are define toy pop rock.
Not to start this convo, but I'd say Ghost are primarily a hard rock band. Songs like Cirice are pretty metal, but the overaching sound is hard rock. Like, their newer stuff has definitely moved away from even classic heavy metal (not that it isn't present at all).
Though I also get why people think they're a metal band. Most metal guys tend to be very strict about what is and isn't, but I notice that most people (and I kind of agree) define something as metal if it like crosses a certain heaviness threshold.
@@Billiamwoods in the spirit of full transparency, I don’t listen to ghost that often. I know a lot of their older stuff is metal but they’ve moved more towards classic/pop rock recently. My girlfriend loves ghost and claims they’re a metal band, she knows more then me about them, I trust her
@@BilliamwoodsTheir newest album has songs like Watcher In The Skies that couldn't sound any more old school heavy. Heck, Twenties is arguably the heaviest Ghost song of all. Most of the people who claim that Ghost "sold out" and "turned into a pop band" probably only ever have heard Square Hammer or He Is on the radio and excpect all of their newer songs to sound that way, which obviously isn't the case. I'm not saying you are necessarily one of these people, but those people definitely exist.
@Billiamwoods I'd say the first 3 ghost records are definitely some form of metal, although not traditionally super heavy metal, but something more in the vein of Black Sabbath or Van Halen. They would've been considered metal in the 80s and I think that's what they are aiming for.
All said Scooby-Doom is still the most apt term I think
@@jameshall6399 I dunno, Infestissumam is the least heavy Ghost album in my opinion. I don't think they have necessarily changed to less metal through the years like many claim, but some of that old grit has been eroded, which is understandable.
Any time anyone mentions Berio, my mind immediately goes to Sequenza III and how Sideways referenced it/him in his Cats video. "OH YEAH DADDY THATS A REAL TOE TAPPER"
Genre is not about classification. It's about forms of expression, which we, as musicians and listeners, come to know and then build upon.
You are the first to express exactly what my definition of music is. Same goes for terms like art! It seems so fundamentally obvious to me as someone who experiences things like music and art in general.
This is Peak 12Tone.
A video about music genres. 7 and a half minutes in, we are still stuck in the "what is MUSIC" part of it.
11:20 man, props for the Machine Head riff 🤘
Music-centered youtubers making friendly response videos between each other is my favorite genre
I'm not sure I agree with a core premise of this video, namely the idea that genre is prescriptive, not descriptive.
The key split for me is between culture associated with genre, and genre as an aesthetic descriptor. I agree with most of what you're saying with reference to culture that builds up around genres, but genres at their core are just descriptions of music based on what they sound similar too.
I've never believed genre to be based on rules that must be followed to exist within it, because all throughout history the driving force behind music has always been to combine your influences and create something unique to yourself. As a musician my goal is never to create a song that is prescriptively part of x genre, because by doing that you're not reflecting your influences nor yourself. I don't like metal and I'm not a part of the shared culture of it, but I can't deny that the aesthetics of the genre will have shaped how I approach creating music, especially more towards the progressive end.
As an example, if I'm a metalhead looking for people with a similar taste in music to me, it's useful to have a general framework to be able to search for and find people who like music that fits my aesthetic preferences. Similarly, a musician who is deep into metal culture will probably end up being heavily influenced by that culture in their own works, and that probably means that the works they create will have aesthetic similarities to metal.
Having said that, I don't have to ascribe to the culture to listen to and enjoy music with the aesthetics of metal, and nor do the bands that make that music. The associated culture is not a requirement to enjoy that genre, nor is it a requirement to create that genre.
In my opinion, the only thing that matters when assigning genre is how the work sounds, and the only reason that matters is to make it easier to find music that fits my aesthetic preferences.
That's not to say the culture isn't relevant nor important, it absolutely is. The traditions and cultures that evolved their respective genres are instrumental in how those aesthetics evolved and are relevant to the purposes of the music. The key point here though is that to me, while a culture may be associated with a genre, a genre is not it's culture. I'd probably actually say that the culture is more important than the genre in this respect, as it gives history to the development and purpose of those aesthetics.
As another example of why I think they're separate but related concepts, look at mods. The subculture isn't associated with a single musical aesthetic, the subculture itself was incredibly broad. Saying "I like mod music" doesn't really give you a good framework for what the music will sound like, and a whole host of aesthetic genres were associated with that shared culture. Soul, R&B, Ska, and Jazz all sound very aesthetically distinct, but they were all part of that shared culture.
Honestly, I think the same is true of metal. While there's a clear, broad, shared subculture surrounding it, the aesthetic preferences of "Metal" as a genre are *incredibly* varied, to the point where saying "I like Metal" is practically meaningless.
I think the key difficulty with defining genre is that the word tends to be used for both. I'd personally split them, with genre being an aesthetic descriptor only and another term to describe subcultures that build up around certain shared musical practices.
I joined a discussion on Reddit asking where/if slap bass can be found in punk music, and early RHCP came up...
Music is the sequence of sounds in order to decorate time with feelings
On the idea of defining music: how important is sound, really? I can't imagine that the deaf experience of music... isn't.
I remember hearing Eastman's _The Holy Presence of Joan of Arc_ (a ~20m piece for like 10? 11?-entirely too many-cellos). It stopped me in my tracks and had me questioning "what is music?". In retrospect, it was more of "do I enjoy this?", but it was such a fascinating experience for me that I love to share it. I've never heard a piece of "traditional" music I'd describe as"challenging" before.
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It's hard to pick a favorite doodle today. Mr. Peabody was a throw (way) back. I laughed out loud at the ape. Spacechem had me double take, but I'm pretty sure I've seen you use it at least once before. AIM wins the biggest nostalgia hit (and makes me feel old; thanks).
I love this discussion on a deep, visceral level that I don't know adequately describe. I think the same argument exists in even the broader "art" community [Citation Needed]. .... like... the reference to `Music for Airports` (and the humanist implications of the fact that this very ... niche?... thing not only does this exist, but it is something /we/ are talking about nearly half a century after it was written) is exactly the thing...
"Sound organised by a sentient being or beings." Is probably my favorite way to describe or define music because it allows for the organisational conflict between performer and audience or audience members. Meaning the context of the listener or performer puts on the sounds is as important as the presence or absence of sound.
What about 4'33 by John Cage? Also, what about music created by nature. For example, music from an aeolian harp.
@@AFastidiousCuber I think the creation and placement of the aeolian harp counts as organising the sound because it's purposefully using the wind to cause it
@@cuckoobrain7999 If waves crashing against a shore randomly produced a melody and you heard it, would it not be appropriate to say "The waves made music"? My point is just, I think who/what created the music is irrelevant.
@@AFastidiousCuber no, recording and presenting those crashing waves makes it music. The defining of the sounds is itself the process of creating the music. You've decorated time with sound, period. It matters not what you used to do so. Popular definition is just "music we, generally, value, we will call Music (big M)".
@@NoConsequenc3 Aren't you basically agreeing with me by defining music in terms of the listener rather than its creator?
It's interesting to hear file sharing cited as a reason for the decline in front line music sales, because the last I looked into that explanation was an invention of music publishing to justify increasingly harsh penalties, and increasingly invasion technical protection measures. I've not checked on the literature for years, but in the heyday of limewire the industry's assertions were flatly unsupported by any evidence. In fact, I'd even say that the publishing industry's response to filesharing (especially their abortive war on format shifting and their increasing reliance on selling the same product over and over again) did more damage to their sales than the filesharing itself did!
genre is most useful as a framework for organizing musical history. its fascinating how the importance between geography, demographic, and the exchange of musical ideas weaves everything together. most disagreements about genre i hear seem to come from people having differences in opinion on how important any of those aspects are - is detroit techno limited only to detroit? an artist in berlin making nearly the same sound was still making something labelled differently. the primary difference in queercore and hardcore at large is demographic and image, but it's an essential part of punk history. it's also weird in the modern day - a microgenre (like many branches of vaporwave) might just be a bunch of friends in a private discord server going after the same idea to start, but now physical geography and traditional demographics don't matter.
imo truly caring about genre in a non-prescriptive way is just caring about history
The most reflexive pop song is probably Sly & the Family Stone's "Dance to the Music." Whatever the lyrics say is repeated by the instruments afterward.
Biz Markie was one of the first rappers we all heard on popular radio. Our parents and teachers hated him singing out of tune, and that made us love him even more. It was a mild form of rebellion.
I think its best to think of genre as a venn diagram. Its always been that way, and people have always been putting them together, obviously, as there are so many fusion genres. Id even argue fusion is the main cause of new genres forming. Its just that recently, people have been fusing genres so often that alot of music is a very open feild with much less fences up to keep genres separate than there were before. When the divide is so hatd to find, it can be easy to say that concept of a genre is gone, but instead it is still there, but has become a spectrum. The reason this has happened is because metal is pushing heavier and heavier over the years, thats what it does. In response, hard rock got softer in general and combined with digital production was leaning closer to pop music than ever before. This also made a gap in between of things that aren't quite either, eg ghost. So this whole thing is pushing genres closer together and creating grey areas over the years, and especially with digital production, bands started experimenting over it and now in the modern day the lines that seperate genres are so blurred that they become near impossible to see sometimes, but just because they arent as easy to categorize doesn't mean the genres aren't there.
Damn thats my nights worth of waffling done right there dont know why i wrote a 10 paragraph essay there but there it is.
The definition given here of a genre reminds me of art movements. Then I went to the wikipedia article for art movement and got my confirmation. Genre = Art movement. So genre die as much as art movement do: They are temporal constructs; when no more people participate in them, they die. It's normal and fine.
Yippie! Genre is such a fun topic, but hoo boy does it confuse me (and don't even get me STARTED on subgenres)
*sweats in vaporwave* y-yeah
I can burp the german national anthem... top notch musical performance!
On another note: The wildest mix/clash of genre fans I ever encountered was at a Babymetal concert. I mean, I knew that all kid of people listen to them, but was not prepared for the reality of it. From the biggest and buffest metal dudes to early teenagers accompanied by parents/grandparents (who probably were not knowing what they had gotten themselves into)... Everybody got along quite good, apparently, but it still is one of the weirdest experiences I had at a concert.
I love the Freudian typo of "all kid of people."
What, you have done here. Is, absolutely perfect!
I'm really, really picky.
With, what I appreciate.
Concerning, OUR place, upon,our planetary placement.
We, are really 'funny' monkeys!
14:30 my mind immediately went to corporate background music! I think you can argue many adverts also use music primarily for the phatic function
The genres I make are more based around topic and community than sound (wizard rock, which is not actually all rock, and filk, which is not all a variation on folk), so I appreciate acknowledging those can be factors in what makes a genre. A playlist in either of those genres may sound like it's all over the place in terms of more common genre labels, but it's still all one genre, just one that relies on different connections. Having a genre label helps in finding those connections, and the diverse sounds are just part of the fun.
Polyphonic lost me when he said Jazz is one of the oldest genres. Thanks for this excellent, informative video, 12 tone!🤟
My definition of music is “any form of sound which is either perceived as music or designed with the intention to be music.” So if something sounds musical to you, then it is music. If someone creates noise with the intention of it being music, it is music. It’s a bit extreme, but idk, I think it serves my brain well haha
To be that guy, what if (just for example) you were to drop dome cutlery by accident on two or more different surfaces, and you heard a melody produced by that. Would that still be musical because the melody occurred from an event that wasn't intentional? Like does the intention for music lay in the production or the reception?
Like I say I'm just riffing a bit and I genuinely would like to know what you think, not trying start an argument cause :)
@@tomjones1506 well I personally don’t think that music exists outside of the living beings that are able to perceive and create it. That’s why I put all of the power in the hands of humans, for if there was no being capable of applying meaning to noise, then the noise would have no meaning outside of it merely being a noise. Humans have the ability to categorize noise as music, and without that arbitrary categorization given to noise by intelligent beings, the sound is just a sound.
Indeed, I've always found it a little baffling when people say, for example, birds sing to each other; and of course to us they do - but do birds think they sing? I would argue no (cue silly mental images of birds actually saying "OI! OI... STEVE!!)
That’s cyclical, and not a definition. That’s like saying “a bike is whatever I say is a bike,” which doesn’t really answer the question.
@@maxalaintwo3578 definitions can be cyclical because definitions are social constructs. We make the rules for them, and if I decide that’s what music is to me, then that’s what music is to me. Music is much more than some sort of rigidly defined term, it is an entirely fluid experience that cannot be placed in a box, and trying to do so is limiting to the form.
Warren Huart as a patron? As in the guy from Produce Like a Pro? Very nice!
As someone who started making original music in 2019, this goes a long way towards explaining why it's hard for me to talk about the genres of the music I make. I am neither in a scene which defines itself by genre, nor being guided to marketability by a label who profits from being able to tell Borders which rack to put my CDs on, and that means that I have to reverse-engineer the unconscious musical inspirations I brought to the work to even guess.
FIGHT. FIGHTING.
all art forms are story telling when you distill them so i always just said music is simply sonic storytelling.
In the early part of this video with the question of whether Mumford and Sons was metal, I was fully expecting commentary around the first metal Grammy being awarded to Jethro Tull.
*This year we've had:*
*Kendrick Lamar vs Drake*
*Scru Face Jean vs Knox Hill (hip-hop reactors)*
*AND NOW*
*12 TONE VS POLYPHONIC*
I often find these kinds of videos difficult since I don't experience much internalization of external phenomenon, but this was good. I do find it strange though how talks about music and genera rarely delve into the subjective post-hoc nature of the generation of shared definitions in general. If one samples a billion people about a billion songs and their classifications (without use of genera words so as to avoid priming effects) the emergent categories (false latent variables) will be different even with longitudinal testing of the same sample; and one would likely expect some correlation with individual affect (current mood state) in the subjective reporting that is being used to create the aggregate. Likewise, the subjective genera (goal) reporting of the creators/artists are unlikely to match the subjective genera reporting (individual or aggregate) of the listeners as time from creation to point of sample approaches infinity.... Sorry, I fell down an OCD tangent for a moment - back to watching videos.
Could you someday do a video on Radioheads Street Spirit, Husker Dü's hardly getting over it, or similarly depressive songs? Take a picture by Filter would also be goated.
I do enjoy a friendly academic slapfight between disagreeing colleagues. It's like the nerd version of arm wrestling with your bros.
"To me, music is anything people experience as musical." ¡Yes! I often (although not always) experience the sound of a washer or dryer or the train going through the BART tubes between San Francisco and Oakland as music.
I doubt you'll ever see this, but could you please please please do a video on will wood 👉👈 also as a guitarist and drummer currently learning music theory, I gotta say, your videos really motivate me to learn more, I love the content!!❤❤❤
My first thought on the importance of "genre" was by how marketing was done in the U.S., and you nailed it by the fact that there was music for and by black people, and music for and by white people. Those people lived in the same places but got different record deals, played different venues, and the music flourished in its own ways. 21st century listeners have less obstacles in finding and liking the music they do.
RICHARD SCARRY!! I finally realized who your art reminds me of!!!
Definitions? For what it’s worth, if ever sharing it helps in any way, I’d like to go like this:
Music : sounds organized, with any degree of intentionality, for the sake of the listening and/or performing experience. Then by extension: the art of / activity consisting of organizing or producing such sounds.
Musical genre: a set of social behaviors involving, but not limited to, musical activity.
Thoughts ?
I wonder if it’s possible to intentionally organize sounds to make a “sound piece”/“sound experience” without considering it music. In the sense the artist doesn’t consider it to be music and rather an experiment
Or poetry that emphasizes the sonical aspects (like the reading of it)
The best definition I have heard for music was in a Music Exploration course ( looking at the history, primarily of European music, with references and comparisons with other music)
The definition was designed to include music that doesn’t sound like music to everybody:
Music is a series of sounds and silences intended to be music. ( I believe you can include bird and whale song in that definition)
I feel like this is going to lead us down the path of defining consensus reality.
mds eu não esperava esse nível de profundidade ao abordar o assunto. amei
I really hate genre definitions in general but I liked your vid. I get it. I grew up as a punk rock kid so now pop-punk as a definition really rubs me wrong. I wish my old friend Steve could watch this one. He was a philosophy master and contemplated existence. Unfortunately, he’s no longer with us. He was an excellent drummer.😊
Wow! That was one hell of a video. Masterclass.
That earworm was rude sir. I had gone several days without that stuck in my head. I bite my thumb at you. 😂
I am really glad you covered this or it would have just been a Friday for me.
1:33 wait hold the hecking phone is it a golden strawberry i now need to know if you have more than me can we get a sick montage of 12tone collecting strawberries
As a car nerd, Nascar races being used as an example of how daunting Fabbri's definition is was immediately hilarious because for car nerds, gearheads, petrol heads, motorsports fans, etc. those roaring engine sounds are not just music but quintessential to the experience of car culture. To the point that huge swaths of the backlash against electric vehicles is the lack of sound. And there isn't just a backlash to the quietness of EVs, but the inauthenticity of the exhaust notes of recentish sports cars. Brands have taken to piping the sounds of a car's engine into the sound system of the vehicle. Presumably as some kind of compromise between a modern vehicle's need to be luxurious, and quiet and pleasant, but also to appease to the seemingly brutish demand for loud exhausts. But enthusiast owners of these cars often take to disconnecting these systems, because, as a driver, the appeal of that noise isn't simply emotive, its informative, almost tactile. If the sounds the car makes are in any way faked, be it simply shoving a microphone inside the engine bay to make the sound louder, or possibly outright faking the noise, that information is no longer accurate and therefore isn't useful. It is also something someone who simply uses a car as a tool to get from point a to point b would never give a shit about because most people don't listen to their car for anything other than bad noises, and even then usually can't identify them. If that isn't music, and being a part of a music sub-culture, I don't fucking know what is.
Unrelated question. Why is reading slash notation on piano so awkward for me?
i like the definition that does not need music to be sound, as far as i know there is sign language music but well, then we can argue about differences between poetry and singing, even among spoken langauge cultures
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway mentioned! hype!!
My definition of music that I find fits without being vague or circular is :
The emergent auditory component of human culture.
I think music is a collection of pitches used in a rhythmic pattern designed to express an idea or emotion. Before I explain genre, instrumentation is the collection of instruments used to create music. Genre is the style, and typically instrumentation, of which music is presented, usually defined by the idea or emotion being expressed
Things are often best described not by what they are, but what they are not, and a definition that describes everything, describes nothing. Definitions gain meaning through what they exclude. This is why circular definitions are bad: they fail to describe the exclusions.
Loved the Hyperbole and a Half reference :)
I think genre is also determined by where the music is performed, who the band is in relation to other bands and their intermeshing audiences. The concept is both general and specific.This is why listening in to different musical scenes in a historical fashion can be a better indicator of style whereas genre tends to be more of a mish-mash catch-all term. I think it is more a product of place and time as well who collaborated with who during the period of time that the artist was active.
The thing with genres is that there are generally three different aspects
You have the community based ones where it’s less defined by sound and moreso by its history and its community. Like the canterbury scene for example. It’s just straight up prog. It’s considered its own genre but if you played a song, i couldnt tell you it originated from canterbury
There are genres based on an idea. Like avant-garde or progressive or whatever. You dont need a specific sound to be avant garde or progressive. Why it could range from goliath by the mars volta to histoire sans parole by harmonium
And the most known one is genre based on music/sound/themes. Like conventions or whatnot. Odd meters, swing, specific instruments etc
Im probably missing others
Try rolling into a Metal concert playing as if Genre doesn’t matter and you’ll find out just how mistaken you are in a hurry…
Ima be real with you as a 30 year old that's been in and out of bands, writing and recording, and living in the metal internet scene for 20 years I don't really think this is the case anymore unless you're literally my dad being weird about it. Like literally Tom Araya isn't even elitist about metal. Most of the time, metal elitism is shunned vehemently.
@@hend0wskiThat depends on what space you're in, for sure. Testament concert? Nobody except the boomers cares. Finnish war metal show? Funny looks are the /nice/ outcome. Tech-death? Caring about the genres might get you a lecture from a turbo nerd if you get it wrong.
@@g3intel no, wait this is actually too real stop I'm having ptsd of a dude with coke can glasses yelling at me through his headgear about why these specific sweep picks aren't actually math rock.. but foreal, yeah it's for sure an issue in places but on the whole I'd say being weird about metal elitism is on its way out of the culture for sure yaknow?
once you're old enough, it's all fusion.
Thank you all for proving my point better than I could!