genre is good, actually

sometimes you have to give stupid names to cool stuff ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

it sounds like we’ve maybe already nipped this in the bud, but at some point last year, the term “y’allternative” began catching on as a genre tag for the rise of alt-country artists leaning into the lanes of grunge, noise, and shoegaze. yet like anything else in the internet age, the term became most ubiquitous during the period of backlash that followed, with the situation recalling spotify’s scandalous push to make the term “bubblegrunge” happen back in 2021. both cases beg the question: can you imagine a future in which we’re all using silly terms like this in earnest?

the short answer is yes, and to put things into perspective, let me just point out that the anti-y’allternative crowd’s demands seemed to be that we continue using serious terminology to refer to this music that includes words like “shoegaze” and “slowcore”—immensely dumb things to call any category of music that have inexplicably caught on at some point over the past 30 years. i often find myself resorting to writing about this topic, but i think the tail end of the irony-poisoned 2000s served as a pivotal moment in how music was not only received by listeners but also how it was made. subgenres like witch house, seapunk, and shitgaze—as well as whatever on earth we might have called merriweather post pavilion if we’d let its disciples cook—were playfully conceived and quickly abandoned as online spaces began to reduce the period of time between new concepts and the type of reactionary knee-jerking that once killed shoegaze off after we at least got loveless.

but here’s the thing: we need to classify music somehow, since vague music-writer adjectives like “anthemic” can only get us so far. in the 19th and 20th centuries, terms like “jazz” and “punk” seemed to be coined naturally from slang that embodied the scenes these nascent movements were coming out of (this still seems to be the case in rap and electronic music, though i genuinely don’t know what terms like “plugg” and “gabber” refer to). by the late 1970s and early ’80s it seemed like genre terminology was becoming more branded (alternative rock), vague (new wave), and even postmodern (post-punk). on the other hand, terms like krautrock, hi-NRG, and sophisti-pop which inexplicably stuck feel organic and, more importantly, clearly defined in the sense that they’ve become sounds an artist can mention to a producer as a point of reference without worrying that their definition of it might include imagine dragons, as is the case with “alt-rock.”

for the record, bubblegrunge was a pre-existing term used by music writers in the ’90s. the fact that spotify co-opted it, though, feels like a natural segue into what’s at stake here if we’re unable to maintain a handle on genre terminology as a culture: it, like everything else, will be co-opted by capitalism. now that there’s no mainstream readership for music journalism—the sociological realm from which so many of the silliest genre names seem to have been coined (much to the artists’ chagrin, historically; sorry!)—we’re at the mercy of big tech and its word-salad, vibeologist playlist titles. “bubblegrunge” is far from the platform’s worst offense, as spotify has led a push to classify music under terms even vaguer than “alt-rock,” and perhaps even more abused than “indie rock,” that are transparently guided by data rather than cultural examination and, sure, perhaps even a little bit of cringey punning.

maybe it’s no surprise that zoomers reared on the service are responsible for the viral posts i see that create false narratives about objective truths. “we’re living in a golden age for folk music and no one seems to realize it,” read a tweet i saw last summer from a user who appeared to be misinformed about the reach of the artists whose album covers were featured on the grid beneath the text—taylor swift, phoebe bridgers, mitski—and perhaps even the definition of “folk.” even if a faction of the post’s 25,000 likes were users who were just excited to see cameron winter and mac dermaro on their feeds, the response to the post seems to signify the seeds of a revisionist history wherein these artists must not have been massively popular, given that the playlists they so often materialize in feature descriptors that set them apart from their pop peers. something tells me a social media site owned by the richest man in the world may have more existential longevity than any of the online music writing outlet that prioritize coverage of these precise artists’ every move.

and this isn’t to say that those outlets aren’t just as guilty when it comes to how music is being contextualized. spotify has its claws deep enough in the music industry at this point that their influence on editorial decisions is hard to deny, whether it’s through the eilish effect on the way popular music sounds as outlined in liz pelly’s mood machine or through publicists’ pitches to writers and editors increasingly relying on data pulled from spotify. maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that the language of music writing has changed from the bad-faith hit pieces and white- and male-centric perspectives of the aughts and late 20th century, but what’s increasingly filling that space feels blindly fueled by marketing language and meaningless data (FLOOD was recently pitched an artist based in part on their single’s “60% save rate” on spotify playlists. must be a really good song, statistically speaking!). websites are covering tracks and albums with language shaped by press releases, which ultimately serve the purpose of generating pull quotes to include in the next press release.

i don’t mean to point fingers at the PR side of things here; in fact, it’s their job to polish the image of their clients as much as they can. but as barriers come down between PR writing and journalism, it feels like we’ve lost focus on the qualifications once needed to write about music—and thus potentially shape culture with the stupid terms we dream up and apply to new trends in sound. publicists can’t do that for their clients in the same way that you can’t give yourself a nickname, and i generally get the sense that they don’t necessarily want to. in most cases, they’re sending writers all the materials we need to formulate our own critical ideas about the music, yet instead we’re increasingly seeing the overly praise-filled prose of the PR machine presented in place of thoughtful criticism. it’s a privilege to be given the opportunity to write subjectively to an audience, or even to play historian and connect the dots between scenes and sounds. i can’t imagine wasting it on merely passing along all of the bullet points shared in an A&R powerpoint.

that said, i will point fingers at the major labels and PR agents working in pop, who seem to be abetting spotify’s anti-genre agenda. i used to vilify gen z for their insistence on killing genre, but at this point it seems clear to me that it’s an inside job. the cliched tech-world term “disruptor” still gets applied to young artists in press releases that play up the militantly anti-genre angle—it’s as if the artist is doing the world a favor by destroying relied-upon frameworks for both writers and other musicians, usually via a recording that’s kind of just a pop song with a guitar part on it and maybe the vocalist raps a little bit. there’s even an inherent sense of competition to framing music this way, as it implies that all of the artists’ peers are saps who succumb to something that’s already been done a million times before, as if pop, rock, and rap aren’t each lanes with infinite possibilities.

i think we should all be more worried when our instincts—either as musicians or as the writers who cover their music—align with the ideals of big tech and major labels. i can’t really fathom the pro-humanity arguments for doing away with terminology that’s pretty central to independent music discovery and perhaps even to its creation, terminology that tends to provide context to sound and foundation for music writing and whatever empty praise that may dangle off of it. the music industry seems to be building the case that all of their biggest cash cows are one-of-one, and they’re getting away with it because they’re quietly doing away with human-sourced outlets for discovering more music that sounds like these artists. for some reason, we’re all eagerly answering the call to help them do their bidding, none as aggressively as the out-for-blood stan mercenaries who will accept nothing less than publicist-speak write-ups of their faves.

there are obviously certain valid criticisms to be made of the way we tend to classify music (most of which involve identity politics; also, have you ever had to say the term “dungeon synth” out loud to a loved one?), and there’s obviously an ugly element of gatekeeping that comes with the territory. but i think these things only strengthen my case that genre is something that needs to be thought about more critically across the board while we still can. because as much as spotify and the majors are leading us to believe that their manufactured gen-z pop stars are breaking down the walls of genre we’ve long been plagued by, they’re merely breaking down the language we’ve long used to talk about these artists in a way that creates a sense of reasonable categorization—which is evidently the enemy of praise. there’s nothing wrong with pushing the boundaries of these pre-established parameters, but i don’t understand this cultural push to erase them completely, either through the removal of familiar terms or the installation of new ones.

anyway, it may be a full two decades before you catch me saying “y’allternative” or “bootgaze” out loud, so in the meantime i’ll be trying to make some bullshit like “howdy-core” or “reckon-rock” catch on. “yankeemo” for when it’s inevitably appropriated by brooklyn bands.