Five genres of music that should be deleted from history
Genre is a concept that is steadily being rendered obsolete. Previously, a genre was important so people knew the kind of music they identified with. It made it easy to know what albums to buy when music was less accessible, and it served as a form of identity. The distinct differences between heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath and pop acts like Madonna were important, but that’s not as much the case today.
As music becomes more accessible and we can listen to tracks in the palm of our hand rather than investing in a record before we can actually play anything, genres have started to overlap and become difficult to separate. This is a good thing, as it makes music more unpredictable for the listener and gives the artist much more creative range.
It took us a while to get here, though, and even with this modern approach to the genre, there are still some terrible tracks out there. That being said, some genres of music stand out as more horrible than others do. Some styles of music are so terrible that we would have done better never to listen to them in the first place. Their existence didn’t contribute to any significant musical evolution; instead, they stand alone as awful blips in history.
Here are five of the worst music genres out there that we would be better to delete from history.
Genres that need to be deleted from history:
Dubstep
In the same way that we look back at Topman’s two for £10 T-shirts and those sunglasses made up of plastic lines, what the hell were we thinking? There was a period where you couldn’t go to a bar or a house party without coming across songs such as ‘Bangarang’ and ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’, and for some reason, we loved it.
Looking back now, the rise of Dubstep was probably the result of a misplaced rebellion. The noise, image, and cringe-worthy nature of the genre were enough to make people willing to buy into what seemed like a brand-new style of music. In retrospect, it’s clear that the genre had never been done before was because it was terrible. The further we can distance ourselves from that bleak period of musical history, the better.
Screamo
Genres overlap a great deal in modern society and don’t represent an individual’s sense of identity quite as much as they used to. When they did, the look that came with Screamo music was arguably the worst and most insufferable of all time. The “nobody understands me, I’m so individual” image was adopted by half the world, and following closely behind was some of the worst music ever written.
There is nothing quite like having a 30-year-old man sing about how hard it is being a teenager, but that forms the foundation of it. V-neck T-shirts, neck tattoos and fringes that cover half the face occupy this awful smudge in music history. Let’s just forget about it.
Folk-rap
When Ed Sheeran took to the stage, slapping his guitar and rapping the lyrics to ‘You Need Me, I Don’t Need You’, the world lost its mind. It was as if rap music hadn’t already existed for over three decades, as the public reacted to the fast lyrics like it was utterly mind-blowing. The truth is, because Sheeran’s image was so far removed from that of hip-hop, people misinterpreted what he was doing as something groundbreaking rather than just an acoustic cover of rap. It led to some of the worst music ever made.
Scrawny teens from up and down the UK were looking up how to slap their guitars and continue playing them. They wrote poor lyrics with no specific flow, and it also became cool to do slowed-down acoustic covers of rap songs. It was a weird time in music and one that we need to get rid of.
Parody music
There should be a line drawn between comedic music and parody songs. While most comedic music is also pretty bad, some exceptions slip through the cracks. However, there are no exceptions when it comes to tracks that are straight-up parodies of other songs; everything is terrible, and everything should be destroyed.
It’s hard to get into the mindset of people who hear classic rock songs and think it would be a good idea to re-write the lyrics but make them about Marks and Spencer’s clothing line; it’s most likely a mindset akin to the Zodiac killers and people who write into Radio 1 telling them to “keep the tunes coming”. There are some people we’re not supposed to understand, and it’s better to leave the unanswered questions as precisely that.
Hair metal
Hair metal is a tricky one. On the one hand, it’s a genre of music that can be a lot of fun to listen to. The guitars are distorted, the choruses are catchy and overall, the songs are pretty feel good. However, if you strip away the surface, you see these tracks for what they truly are, and once you do that, you recognise it’s a genre that needs to be deleted from history.
Hair metal is a lazy branch of glam rock that steals from it musically, simplifies it and removes any form of substance. Songs start from a chorus and work backwards, trying to create hits devoid of any sufficient meaning. Not to mention, a lot of these tracks have a deep-rooted misogyny that only adds to the sonic insult of them.
