Sunday, July 5, 2015

"What kind of music do you like?"

It's over complicated to answer this question. It is for me, it is for you. No one treats it that way, and I don't know why not. 
Firstly, the idea of genrefication in music is pretty problematic. I can't make it make sense to say there are two artists in the same genre, barring some very general similarities or pretty general differences. There are general sounds, I suppose, but one artist can shift and re-shape, morph, bend, break, invent, etc all within the same genre, so that what is at one end of the spectrum, while ostensibly the same genre, has very little in common with what's at the other end.
Really all a genre name is meant to do is simplify out all of those little complexities: to find a way of talking about music while also ignoring every one of its interesting features. It is unhelpful shorthand. 
On the other hand, to dig into all of the fine-grained distinctions, multiply our genre lexicon to the extent that it would be able to handle all of those distinctions would also be unhelpful, because no one would know what anyone else was talking about. Setting up those genre lines would be just as nebulous as not setting them up: ask two country music fans what "real country" is, and you'll get three different answers, each of them supposed to mean "this is definitional of the genre", but actually just means "this is something I like".
In short, the genre game is just nonsense.
But Secondly, I don't pay much attention to genre anyway. I don't mean to say I have "eclectic" tastes, that's just as unhelpful and obnoxious as anything else. What matters to me most is lyrics, what they're about, how they're phrased. Whether or not I'm hearing something put in a way I've never heard it put before, etc. Individual people are "better" or "worse" at that (this is subjective, I just mean I like it more or less), and they're spread out all over. It's not eclectic, it's really only one thing I like. That one thing just doesn't map at all onto the concept of genre.
So is this a reasonable answer to the question?
Well, yes and no. It adequately answers what I'm looking for (I think), but that isn't what's being asked for is it?
Because, Thirdly, this question only exists to weasel the shorthand genre answer out of someone, not because that's helpful. It isn't. It's so that we can use this (non-)information to make character assessments of other people. It's to decide if you and I belong to the same category, and if we do, we can be friends, and if not it's going to be rocky. 
Based on practically no information at all!
It's amazing to me that anyone ever has friends.

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