Electric Limbo Rock - the latest music genre

Have a gander at the latest Brag magazine, there is a nice little write up on The Crookers that goes on to state “Partly because that twisted-electro-house-cum-vocal-thrash-fidget sound is pretty popular right now”.

HUH?

Sure this may be taking the piss but people are actually going to this extent to try and label music and to be honest I’m struggling to keep up.   

Rewind 60 years. Elvis Presley was the coolest cat around and music was pretty simple to classify. Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues, Country, Folk, Classical and Gospel. Over the next ten or so years the lines between genres were getting crossed and artists were trying new things, the end result Folk-Rock, Blues Rock and so on. Basic.

Over the years rock evolves and we are introduced to Punk Music which brings us the likes of The Ramones and The Sex Pistols. Fast forward to the 90’s…Alternative Rock is on the rise and Kurt Cobain becomes a house hold name. Its all pretty straight forward until we get into sub genres and other music styles become just as big. 

Take this for example

Rock which gave rise to Indie Rock which is linked to Post-Punk and births Dance Punk, Electro Rock and of coarse New Rave which seemed to be over just as quick as it started. Speaking of which we are still waiting for the Klaxons to release a follow up from their 2007 album Myths of the Near Future that they keep promising. I sure hope they have a few tricks up their sleeve because that's the sad thing about these microgenres, they are not a sturdy as the original model. Thank god New Young Pony Club have tried to steer clear of this association with their latest album The Optimist. Their still NYPC as we love them and just as danceable. 

 

Either way its these little buggers (micro genres) that bleed into one another to confuse the hell out of me. There are over a thousand different genres of music these days and a good 50 or so have ‘core’ somewhere in their name. From Pornocore, a filthy X-rated genre of Hip-Hop, to Nerdcore, yet another side project of Hip-Hop where the artists rap about politics, Star Wars and computers things are getting a little out of hand.  Imagine if Weird Al was being legit then this would be Nerdcore to a T

Lets not forget:

Wizard Rock. You will have to take a listen to 50 Points from Slytheran to see what I mean. Dumbledoor in particular...

Burger-Highlife

Chicken scratch

Intelligent dance music 

Nintendocore

Yodell Rock

Yeah OK so that last one was made up but you get my gist and besides that would be hilarious to see/hear. I give it three years. But don't steer clear of a genre just because the name sounds less than appealing. Take for example Math Rock legends Battles out of NYC who are A-Mazing. 

 

Math Rock is a pretty hard genre to articulate, think progressive, experimental, avant-garde rock. And now I have just gone done it myself, listed a bunch of words to describe music that end up meaning little to half  the people reading this. Well I can tell you this -  "it [the term ‘math rock’] was invented by a friend of ours as a derogatory term for a band me and James [Lo – Chavez’s drummer] played in called Wider. But his whole joke is that he’d watch the song and not react at all, and then take out his calculator to figure out how good the song was. So he’d call it math rock, and it was a total diss, as it should be.” Safe to say a fair few of the other odd genres came about a similar way. 

As much as I hate, and am useless at pigeonholing music thanks to these microgenres, we can also thank them for some wicked new sounds and phenomenal bands that aren't afraid to try something new. Either way if your just as confused about music genres as I am then have a look at this blog it has it pretty much down pat. 

POSTED BY REEBAJEEB