Welcome back to The Listen Up, Nerds Newsletter
Today, let’s start with the most common question you face as a participant in subculture: What kind of music are you into?
Last month, Spotify released Spotify Wrapped to much fanfare and some confusion/bemusement as music fans are wont to express. Spotify gave listeners a rundown of their favorite genres but included several names of genres that don’t exist outside of Spotify’s tag cloud. Now, part of me wants to be cynical about a big company pulling the veil back a little bit. “They’re only doing this to make us mad so we’ll share it with a tweet saying ‘What in the fuck is “Mellow Gold?” The Eagles? Joni Mitchell?? That’s just classic rock!’”
Sure, outrage fuels Twitter shares, but it doesn’t rule everything. Some people actually use social media to share information and spread new ideas. That sounds quaint but it’s true! Anyway if you looked at your Wrapped, you probably said “What in the hell do these people think I’m listening to? What am I listening to?”
There’s a specter haunting Guitar-Based Subculture Music: The specter of genre.
At one point in time, tagging music by genre was a useful tool. It served us with a way to talk about music and scenes in specific terms and to lead other down the road we traveled. But as we dive deeper into an all-consuming algorithmic existence, we have lost the plot. We no longer use useful terms such as Post-Punk, Post-Rock, Metalcore, Melodic Hardcore, or even Rap Metal. Although we’ve left behind some sort of structuralist nightmare where your understanding of a genre requires the previous context of another entire genre, at least those genre tags left breadcrumbs through the dark forest of the internet. Now your understanding of art is compartmentalized into names like Dreamo, Bubblegrunge, Witchcore, Insanecore, and even *shudder* Goblincore1.
While these are all, ostensibly, words, they don’t mean anything. Perhaps I’m getting old but there is not a burgeoning Bubblegrunge scene in Sioux Falls2 that I need to hear about. Music genres should describe the sounds, the contexts, the scene where it was created. The combinations of letters above don’t serve a purpose other than to perhaps describe music that the feeling that an image might give you. Doesn’t this song remind you of the Jared Leto Joker from Suicide Squad? That is Insanecore. You watched a movie and a creepy green-skinned guy tiptoed up the steps to steal a sacred item? That’s so Goblincore.
This has nothing to do with the actual music contained within the “genre” but rather uses reference points based on other senses and other contexts to give you something that might fit your *~mood~* or current situation. Lo-Fi Beats To Study To. 4K Cozy Coffee Shop Smooth Piano Jazz For Relaxing. Music That Makes You Feel Like The Main Character. This seemingly benign act is a war on the artist’s expression and turns their own piece, their own shout into the void, into a product that serves you rather than a message you receive.
By serving a solution or companion to the mood, the audience is not a participant of the art but is a customer of the service. This service gives the listener a piece of music that is based on mood and aesthetic choices rather than letting the art stand on its own or, at the very most, the community where it came from. The nebulous “algorithm” is designed to flatten everything into background music rather than making you a conscientious listener and purveyor of art. It’s a perversion of music in a way that I will not stand for, dear reader! Music is art! Art is not a service!
There’s so much media out there that the internet has become a digital version of Borges’ Library Of Babel. A machine is the only way to sort these things out at this point. Making a machine seems like the right call when you cannot possibly parse out all of this media. That machine doesn’t know how to connect the dots vis-a-vis things like Record Labels or Band Proximity just yet, so listeners rely on tag cloud-based algorithms to guide them to something new. So, sure, we can rely on a machine to be our guide to what bands might sound similar to one another (Three selections from Hatebreed’s “Under The Knife” EP wound up on my “Dreamo” playlist next to DIIV and Orchid), but what do we do with the IRL dialect of genre now that those words don’t even resemble language?
I’d like to present the idea that we need to banish the vocalization of genre names until we get our shit together. This was once useful but we’ve passed the tipping point where the machines are guiding us more than we’re guiding the machines and I cannot trust a computer the same way that I can trust a crusty old scene veteran at a record store. The time is now: Stop Using Genre Names.
“But Jay,” I hear you whimper, “How can I tell my friends what a new band sounds like? How will people know that I know what’s cool if I can't speak to my friends in the way that a machine would???”
For the answer, let’s go somewhere that a machine cannot go: The Flesh Realm.
A computer does not know of bodies or spaces. It doesn’t have a nervous system. It’s crunching 0s and 1s until the plug is pulled. If a computer can’t have a body, it can’t go to a show, it can’t mosh, and it certainly cannot stagedive or crowdsurf. Computers don’t know how to respond to music, and that’s where the human body surpasses its digital counterpart.
Here are the two genres of Guitar-Based Subculture Music from here on out: Stagediving and Crowdsurfing. There is music to stagedive to, and there is music to crowdsurf to. There is no middle ground between the two, in my humble opinion. This captures the overall success level of a band (you cannot stagedive to more popular bands as it is not permitted by the venues they play) and aggression/accessibility level. You can stagedive to a crowdsurf band but you cannot crowdsurf to a stagedive band.
Let’s consider a few bands here that are all in the same scene: Drug Church is a Stagedive band. Militarie Gun is a Crowdsurf band. Turnstile was a Stagedive band that is now a Crowdsurf band. They’re all slowly evolving over time but even in my limited experience, Militarie Gun’s pop proclivities lend them to crowdsurfing in ways that Drug Church never did. Protomartyr is a Stagedive band and Parquet Courts is a Crowdsurf band and Ceremony is Crowdsurf-Presenting but is actually Stagedive. All of these bands could fall into the same AI-generated Spotify playlist but their energies are clearly different.
Even with huge bands, there’s a clear delineation in energies between a band like Rage Against The Machine (Stagedive) and Metallica (Crowdsurf). Someone may crowdsurf at a RATM show but it’ll be seen as gauche and “Kinda wack tbh.” If someone somehow makes it to the stage at a Metallica show and stagedives, then that is “Bad fuckin’ ass, dude.”
“But JAYYYYYY,” you whimper again, face soaked in tears, your lip quivering in a cartoonish manner, “What about bands that don’t fit either description?” There aren’t any. There’s simply no example of a band that is neither Stagedive or Crowdsurf-worthy. Even Sunn O))), who I saw a couple of weeks back, have a documented history of people stagediving to their music3.
The point of this is to separate the human experience from anything a machine could learn. Human experience is valid and valuable. A computer doesn’t have a way to show love like this and it cannot be programmed that way. It’s a tool to solve a problem, and therein lies the issue: The feeling art gives you isn’t a problem to solve.
The two genres I’ve proposed touch on human activity in ways that no computer could replicate. There is community in the act of Crowdsurfing. It takes several people to hoist someone into the air for their favorite song and keep them up there for as long as they want. It’s a physical act that, if Boston Dynamics programmed robots to do, the robots would mangle a human and turn them into a pretzel in approximately .3 seconds. There’s also solitary power in the Stagedive, an act where one is so overcome with catharsis that they have to put themselves onto a platform and hurl themselves, and their experience, into other people.
I’m a vibes-based person more than a data and research guy. I value human experience over data. My responses to any new concept presented to me can be drilled down to, “That’s chill,” or, “That’s not chill.” The feeling you get from music? That’s a vibe. One thing about music? When it hits, you feel no pain. Sometimes music hits different fr. The idea that we’d entrust art and our sense of feeling and discovery to something that cannot pick up on a vibe, the low key awkward homie that is The Computer, is going to lead us to certain burnout. And dear reader, that is certainly not chill at all.
R U Rocking with that? Is vibing the vibe for 2023? Are you going to Crowdsurf at a Stagedive Band show? Sound off in the comments and drop a like for your boy. Tell your friends in bands that they are a Crowdsurf or Stagedive Band and then tell me what happens.
Oxford’s “Word Of The Year” going to the phrase “Goblin Mode” is one of the most craven and upsetting plays for attention I’ve seen in the social media age and I’ve seen a LOT of those
If this is real, please tell me
This is my favorite video of all time. Thanks for watching.