Is genre dissolving within alternative music?
The days of mods and rockers scrapping on Brighton Beach in the mid-1960s feel like ancient history. In a time when genres and their respective subcultures are becoming increasingly blurred, people from a certain generation may look back misty-eyed to the scenes of their youth, where identities and kinship were forged over the shared love of a select strand of music’s mosaic of communities.
Be it the 2 Tone Mod and Skin revivalists, the androgynous New Romantics that descended upon Covent Garden’s The Blitz every Tuesday night, or the beer-stained devotees of The New Wave of British Heavy Metal, genre was an essential feature of many a youth’s sense of belonging.
This romanticism, however, can often impede creativity. The dissolving of genre and its easy categorisations has freed artists to pursue an infinitely wider birth of musical possibilities, from Seattle drone metal mages Sunn O)))’s extraordinary collaboration with Scott Walker or Bristol record label Avon Terror Corp’s beguiling fusion of industrial electronica and arcane Avon folklore display artistry concerned with intrepidly exploring new sonic and conceptual terrain over impressing each other with their ‘scene’ credentials.
The rapacious pace of change in the wake of the internet has meant genres and entire ‘scenes’ can take place fragmentally and scattered across the globe. Discord and Reddit communities are less concerned with the rigid expectations of the genre but more an embrace of participatory escapism or even lifestyle, dungeon synth, witchcore, or the vast gloop of vapour/chillwave parading their labels as perfunctory tags for easy Bandcamp search findings than any real regard for pigeonholed identification.
Plenty of artists hate the genres they’re given anyway. ‘Trip-hop’ was always a silly term, originally coined in good faith by Mixmag to describe DJ Shadow’s slack turntablism but eventually plaguing Bristol bands like Massive Attack or Portishead ever since, the latter’s Geoff Barrow making clear his feelings on X in 2019: “If you’re already describing it as ‘Trip hop’, it’s obvious you haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re talking about.” ‘Eggpunk’ too often triggers an eye roll to its credited progenitors, rejecting the genre’s associations with formulaic lo-fi and seeing what they do as just a continuation of punk.
Ultimately, genre still exists as a handy indicator to promote and discuss new music. The standards that were set in the last century still loom over the new yet to entirely shake off pop and rock’s Rolling Stone heritage, and journalists need some kind of established lexicon to praise or excoriate one’s latest album, plus genres can often be used to convey attitude rather than clear, sonic category. Chicago rap duo Angry Blackmen’s verbal affrontery as much punk as Dead Kennedys or electronic artist Nils Frahm confidently inhabiting the same legacy as classical music.
With the cultural shifts wrought by online culture, it could be that ‘content’ is what defines future songs, even the oldies that reach number one because of some viral attention on TikTok. Depeche Mode’s ‘Never Let Me Down Again’ or Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ as featured on Last of Us and Stranger Things saw a spike of interest among a Gen Z crowd who weren’t concerned with the genres but more how they served their beloved TV shows.
While the debate around genre’s dissolution is still open, what’s certain is that labels will forever be redefined and recontextualised as long as alternative music continues to innovate.
