Losing My Edge: the increasingly rapid turnover of the “cool” genre
It’s been almost two decades since James Murphy sang, “I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables, I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars”, but the musical tides are still turning just as quickly. Barely used synths and arpeggiators are being thrown out of the window in favour of guitar pedals and whammy bars, and then those same pedals and bars are being sold on Facebook marketplace to fund CDJs and drum machines and an Ableton subscription. It’s an endless scramble to keep up with what’s cool, a desperate competition to not lose your edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
Audiences feel the pressure to keep up just as much as artists. Dan Carey and Speedy Wunderground revived post-punk, but the genre was proclaimed dead the second the hype around Black Midi and Black Country, New Road extended past the walls of Brixton’s beloved windmill. Instead, we’ll turn to the fuzz and distortion of 1990s shoegaze, but only until TikTok discovers Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’ and the internet decides My Bloody Valentine were overrated the first time around. Viva la shoegaze. The return of nu-metal. The resurgence of indie sleaze. And all within the last five years. It’s impossible to keep up – audiences don’t know what they really want.
But was it always this way? Audiences have forever been fickle, constantly seeking out the newest, coolest trends. Still, it certainly feels like the cyclical nature of genre frameworks is increasing in frequency. Subcultures used to define decades – psych and acid rock is still associated with the 1960s. Simon Reynolds tracked the first run of post-punk as lasting from 1978 to 1984. Acid house permeated club culture in the 1980s. Now, genres are lucky if they last a year or two before they’re deemed “uncool”.
As with most changes in the modern music industry, the internet is at the heart of this phenomenon. Fashion trends, trending topics, music – everything moves quicker and, consequently, attention spans are shorter. It’s almost a form of cultural accelerationism. TikTok exhausts a song before it’s even received a studio release. Artists rapidly gain success beyond their wildest dreams, and then they’re collectively forgotten about a week later. The speed and content overload provided by social media has removed the staying power of music. We’re all seeking out the next big thing.
Fans don’t need to go to a record store, purchase an album, and drop a needle onto vinyl anymore. All the music in the world is available in the palm of their hands. It’s simultaneously amazing and overwhelming. It’s so easy to overplay a song, to have the algorithm throw it at you until you grow to hate it and to find a new one to replace it just as quickly.
It’s also become increasingly easy to gauge the popularity of music. Alternative subcultures, in particular, have always had to toe the line between the popular and underground to maintain their cultural coolness. Everyone wants to discover the underground hits before their friends do, and when a “cool” artist slips from the underground into the mainstream, those who once lauded their music will turn on them.
The internet is always there to reaffirm this. Twitter and Reddit are overflowing with ever-changing music opinions on what’s cool and what’s not, who’s cool and who’s not. As opinions become more collective, it’s easy to be influenced by the consensus found on the internet. From Black Country, New Road to Phoebe Bridgers and Wet Leg, there comes a breaking point for indie artists with cult followings, where some fans will deem their music no longer cool for gaining widespread success. This opinion spreads across social media and, sometimes, by extension, whole genres are turned on.
Post-punk has seen two revivals in just the last 20 years. In the early 2000s, Interpol and The Killers and Franz Ferdinand gained commercial success for reviving the genre. By the late 2000s, the genre had died again as indie sleaze took its place. The late 2010s redefined and resuscitated the genre with a new, more abrasive and politically-charged sound spearheaded by the likes of Squid, Fontaines D.C., and Dry Cleaning. Already, audiences seem to have lost interest in the genre due to its booming popularity outside of Radio 6 dads. The turnover of what fans deem as the “cool” genre is increasingly quick, and artists are being forced to keep up.
This may well be intertwined with the revival culture that seems to pervade alternative music at the moment. New genres are rare to come by – rather, nu-metal, indie sleaze and post-punk have all seen a resurgence in recent years. On their second or third waves, bands are faced with the more difficult task of keeping things fresh and keeping fans interested.
It also seems that we’re looking to categorise contemporary artists into genres far more than we once were, exhausting those definitions as we go. As the internet deems certain music “Patrician-core” or “Post-Brexit pop”, definitions are becoming muddled and overused. Artists, fans, and the industry can’t agree on genre definitions, and as they clutch at straws, the process becomes more artificial. Rather than running their natural course, genres are quickly pushed out as fans become fatigued with hearing about them. Post-punk was run into the ground by its excessive use amongst bands who weren’t even making post-punk but used the term as it was at the forefront of cool.
If the 1960s were defined by the hippie subculture, the 1970s by the punks, and the 1980s by post-punk and synth-pop, what would the 2010s be defined by? Bedroom pop? Shoegaze? Post-punk? Hyper-pop? They’ve all had their moment. Really, this breadth and newfound accessibility to such a range of genres should be celebrated, not pushed through an endless, unrelenting cycle to try and define what’s cool and what isn’t.
The reality is post-punk can’t be “cool” one day and “uncool” the next. It’s either “cool” or it isn’t. Rather than desperately trying to keep up with trends in order to retain their edge, audiences and bands should let go of the pressure to be cool and define it themselves.
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