How the Internet and the (Temporary) End of History Killed Subgenre
The idea of musical subgenres has become old-fashioned. Whether it’s blackgaze, vaporwave, post-punk revival, math rock, slowcore, goth, freak folk, groove metal, or G-funk, the subgenre (and the noxious microgenre) no longer contribute to the experience of listening to music, least of all in the last ten or so years. At best, they’re genealogies for neurotic audiophiles, and at worst, ham-fisted jargon for those same gatekeeping audiophiles. I say this with confidence because I wrote a 3,000 word argument for subgenre’s importance until I found the position as indefensible as the existence of seapunk.
Don’t get me wrong - I pine for the days where there seemed to be a new subgenre, a new counter-culture every few years. I’m thinking of a musical golden age where truly divergent musical forms were born out of radical change and historical circumstance, the same years that James Murphy singles out in his reference-heavy single, “Losing My Edge:” where he bemoans, “I’m losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.” Weren’t those the days?
Nowadays, benighted hipsters are trapped in our 21st century, an era where country-rap is an actual genre and where fifth wave emo is paving the way for its sixth. But I don’t want you to predict this essay to be about why modern music is bad or why musical subgenres are a scam. Back in the genre and subgenre’s heyday, there were a surge of new types of music in the years that birthed rap, rock, soul, punk, R&B, house, bebop, country, psychedelia, funk, and metal, and we should be thankful for those years in the same way the literati are thankful for Romantic poetry and cinephiles for the French New Wave. But the current lack of new subgenres isn’t music’s fault - it’s history’s. The modern regimes that exist on nearly every continent are concerned with economic and social stability and any significant shifts in any direction leave our leaders vulnerable to criticism. So, in the era of globalism that began with the defeat of the Soviet Union, political leaders and a media funded by multinational conglomerates have collaborated to permit only enough change to keep up appearances while shoring up the relentless profiteering and mass surveillance that defines modern states. The result is a hopeless culture that looks to corporate culture and technological dynamos for comfort or inspiration because the aesthetic ones have failed to be the catalysts for change we expected them to be.
With groups of listeners and musicians failing to see the importance of their work at a collective level, music is no longer achieving the originality it was once capable of. That ended sometime at the end of the 20th century. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Originality is only one facet of music or art. Instead, I think - wait for it - originality is overrated.
With that, the sacred cow has been slaughtered and my audience surely halved by this point.
Oh, you’re still here? Let’s proceed.
When music geeks talk about what makes some music better than other kinds of music, it’ll often become a conversation about how originality and creativity have inspired their successors. It’s the reason most people say Elvis, The Beatles, or Bob Dylan are often cited as the most important icons of rock music, because any famous musician from that era will reference them as having an influence on their work because it stood out so starkly in comparison to their contemporaries. The types of musicians that get lauded will be those that pushed musical boundaries rather than embraced them, never sticking to a predictable formula. Artists like Kate Bush, The Beatles, Kanye, Bowie, Bjork, and Radiohead come to mind. Prioritizing originality might feel appropriate but it also places undue comparisons to artists that purposefully stick to a sound, as if those artists are inferior because they don’t evolve musically, instead opting for an improvement of an established formula. As our culture moves farther away from the countercultural revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s it’ll become harder and harder to replicate the spirit of creativity and resistance that politics and the media have successfully tamed. The broad spectrum of sounds is merging rapidly.
Our diminishing of new musical directions in comparison to the last century doesn’t mean that music has run out of room to run, only that the days of unbridled originality are on hold, frozen like Han Solo in carbonite. Instead of rejecting this cultural moment of dwindling originality, we should value something else instead, maybe even something that has always been more valuable than novelty alone - feeling.
But before talking about feeling versus originality in music, it’s crucial to understand the two reason we got into our current zeitgeist. For one, music has lost creative steam since (and because of) America’s brand of capitalism defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War and became the last superpower in the game - back when George H.W. Bush said something about “a new world order.” Except it wasn’t a conspiratorial reference to the Illuminati but the victory speech of free-market capitalism over the deep-sixed U.S.S.R.. The defeat of the Soviet Union was the final nail in the coffin for a socialistic or communistic alternative to bear fruit. There were no longer any realistic models to aggressively compete with the West’s emphasis on private needs with Russia’s emphasis on communal needs. With Russia defeated, the West double-downed on the idea that radical individualism and competition are the keys to well-being and happiness! Nations playing with the idea of moving away from America’s free market capitalism now had no other option but to play the game - a total 360 from previous decades where Russia might have funded third-world countries for advocating for social programs and government intervention - two ideas that American plutocrats feared would replace the free hand of capitalism. The model of the Soviet Union as international interventionists informed the counterculture of the 60s and 70s even while recognizing the corruption in Maoist China or Gorbachev’s Mother Russia.
When the United States had an “evil” superpower like the Soviet Union looming in the background, politicians were forced to maintain many of the social programs from the New Deal to maintain the public’s quality of life - and also to keep people happy while corporations were raking it in. As anti-communisitic as the 50s and 60s were, social programs were handed out far more readily with the precedent set in the 1930s when American voters were considering socialism in the fallout of the Great Depression. Once the Cold War began showing signs of ending, congress began to roll back those liberties because the threat of a socialist alternative had finally dissipated. With the lack of political options beyond sometimes indistinguishable presidential candidates, this is one of the unconscious reasons we’re obsessed with the past. With our votes inability to actuate real change, we fantasize about past realities where that seemed to not be the case. Our nostalgia is so severe in the present because we want to ignore the present via escapism. Because we’ve seemed to run out of options.
That goes hand in hand with the second reason originality has run out of steam: the internet. The advent of the internet that accompanied the Cold War’s end has allowed for ready access to so many intermixed sounds and the blurring of barriers that music today is an amalgam of subgenres rather than the hyper-balkanization some make it out to be. Music in the internet age isn’t becoming increasingly fragmented but increasingly blended. When you combine the ubiquity of the internet with the shared malaise felt by most people in an age without alternatives, you get billions of eyes staring back into the past, into a time when possibilities seemed accessible, the familiar nostalgia that denies the present and worships an inaccessible past. Just looking back in time at all is an actualization of possibility, a way you can transport yourself to the idyllic ‘50s, the radical ‘60s.
These two reasons aren’t proof of aural damnation but point us to what music still offers, what was most important about music before we expected a musical revolution every presidential election. What’s most salient in a song isn’t genre-bending or originality but the ability to convey feelings between artist and audience. It’s a cliche I know - certainly not original - but genre and subgenre codification is brainy navel-gazing compared to music’s power to communicate emotion and galvanize a sense of embodying feeling. Emphasizing music’s slowing evolution and only looking backwards instead of occupying the present deadens a feeling for music rather than stirring it to life.
In addition to our obsession with nostalgia is the continued attempt to construct subgenres as original movements. The specious originality of these subgenres serves the same function as the false progress advertised by our centrists congressmen and the woke-posturing of corporate PR. Some of the most recent subgenres in music (cloud rap, hyperpop, alternative R&B, etc.) have been evoked not as natural responses to distinct and unified periods but subtle marketing tools that place the cart of labels before the horse of music. I’m even wary of queercore becoming an extension of more pink-washing down the road. If subtle deviations from established genres merit their own categorization, then the bar remains too low to expect legitimate genres to emerge from the culture yet again, especially in comparison to the radical departures of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Musical movements can and have been manufactured (as you’ll see in a little bit) and disrupt authentic musical movements that attempt to resist the fabricated social reality designed by the interests of international profittering. Legitimate subgenres may no longer be in the hands of our culture but subsumed and neutered by big tech and algorithms. And why stop with organic subgenres when companies like Spotify can manufacture scenes and subgenres, making your listening habits as predictable as next quarter’s ballooning profits?
Originally, music responded to history and worked to speak to the dynamic moments of the present moment be it baroque orchestral works of the 17th century or spirituals in the 19th century. In the beginning, the difference between genres was obvious because listenership was concentrated and stabie. How could you confuse ragtime from chamber music or Appalachian folk from African-American spirituals? Listeners didn’t usually stray from what they liked (much less from where they lived) because ethnic and cultural barriers were so much more rigid. But as musical creativity continued flourishing into the 20th century and those barriers began to fray, it became important to distinguish the differences in genre reflected in new social developments. Hank Williams wasn’t just a folk singer, Chuck Berry was doing more than playing a blues progression, and what Charlie Parker did on the sax tore up the jazz rulebook that Louis Armstrong adhered to. After the Second World War, the technological advances and expanded freedoms in liberal democracies allowed more transgressive behaviors than ever before and paved the way for a major cultural boom. That very boom needed a new vocabulary to help understand the twists and turns of a new musical era. A paradigm shift like this justified the laundry list of new genres made possible by new technologies and permissive attitudes.
After the 20th century’s sui generis burst of creativity in genres like bebop, metal, or funk, we get the 21st century’s revivals, waves, and blends of pre-existing genres. Once again, not outright examples of bad music run amok, but a far cry from the groundbreaking sea change of the past.
The reason the music has yet to change in ways that are simultaneously radical and popular is that both history, culture, and people haven’t really changed that much since sometime in the ‘80s or ‘90s, around the end of the Cold War and the beginning of capitalism’s absolute dominance. Even with all of the progressive movements of the past few decades and the gains made from the democratic party, I’m sorry to say it isn’t enough to merit legitimate change - it’s the equivalent of examining the window-dressing when the house is burning down. Western culture has restricted our political and aesthetic alternatives to only corporatism, imperialism, and consumerism for the sake of consumerism.
So for every significant change in the West, be it the normalization of gay and trans rights, the rise of global terrorism, and even the supposed proto-fascism from the right - as long as the United States dominates the Earth, the free market economy functioning as globalism’s golden calf, and our basic liberties striped away while less important ones are proffered, we can’t expect groundbreaking shifts to happen in the arts and music. If the culture is separated from the reality, why should the music be any different?
One of the last great examples of sound responding to history in engaged and honest ways (maybe the last time it did before hip-hop did the same thing but better) was the advent of punk music, the confluence of events that was more than coincidental. The over-commercialization of music, the cynicism after Watergate and Vietnam, the untapped potentials of speed, noise, and anger - these elements made for the ideal setting for Patti Smith, the Ramones, Dead Boys, etc. to manifest an original and unified sound. From the primordial soup of CBGBs in bankrupt Manhattan, the rest of the rock world followed suit, fostering sounds that didn’t even sound “punk” but were reliant on an attitude of “fuck it, what do we got to lose?” articulating a Weltschmerz metastasizing in western civilization. For Westerners, decline was felt everywhere - recessions at home, OPEC controlling petroleum reserves, China and Japan vying for control of the markets. The same pessimism, anger, and confusion articulated in New York, L.A., and London could be felt in suburbia, the Midwest, and rural England. Punk gave that frightening aura a soundtrack, just as rock ‘n roll did for the social freedoms in the 50s and the blues did in Jim Crow era-America.
But the most recent game-changer (the rise of Trump’s right) hasn’t introduced any significant creative shifts, unless you want to call a nude painting of Trump an act of artistic brilliance. As long as we are told that history is constantly shifting in these ways every few years (or even months or days with the incessant 24 hour news cycle) we expect the culture to change in lockstop. Instead, nothing is changing but a narrative managed by a handful of news conglomerates and lobbyist-bought politicians.
An example of how the media can create these narratives is found in one of the first and most famously manufactured subgenres - grunge. The subgenre of “grunge rock” was a label given to heavy Pacific Northwest rock bands in the early ‘90s. The label didn’t function as an accurate depiction of the music - just listen to Pearl Jam and the Melvins to see how wide of a spectrum you get - but a label that bands would either be attributed to via the media (building up the cachet of their fabricated genre) or a route for lesser bands to call themselves and capitalize off the hype. None of the major “grunge” bands of the period chose to be labelled as such and media reps would quite literally make up slang from the Seattle area to world-build a culture that in actuality wasn’t that different from the rest of strip-mall America. The promise of a unique culture tucked away among the lumberjacks and rain was a bold lie that the rest of the country tuned in to, blind faith that American culture is exciting and inventive like it always has been.
Granted, the Northwest was an isolated region and the fusion of metal, punk, and rock was very real and even unique. A number of excellent bands from the area only became successful because of this manufactured hype which is to be appreciated, but a subgenre like grunge reveals that the vocabulary that we use to talk about music is often invented in boardrooms not basements. It wasn’t outré enough to warrant such a label. So even if the grunge explosion and the contemporaneous movements of alternative and indie that rose with it in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was a legitimate shift from hair metal’s popularity, none of these subgenres capture how “grungy” or “alternative” or “indie” that music was.
Yet the alternative music of that era was the beginning of something important, something that responded to the commercialization and costumes of ‘80s heavy metal - an escape attempt from the ‘80s embrace of stylized categorization. For rock music, the ‘90s were an attempt to subvert subgenre. A band like Nirvana or Soundgarden was combining the preexisting sounds of metal, punk, and classic rock and seeing what came out. What grunge represented was the popularization of musicians fusing melody and aggression in ways heavier than even punk, but the music media of the time was more interested in codifying the movement in its specific time and place and not as a larger movement that helped presage the weird syntheses that followed after it. Hair metal as a subgenre is a sort of culture of cliches (no offense), an identity composed of recognizable tropes and gestures - in many ways a perfect distillation of what subgenre often is, a composite of readymade motifs. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy hair metal. Besides, many quote, non-conformist subcultures, often ostracize those who don’t dress and look like them. The alt kids of the ‘90s are no exception. The fact of the matter is that the alternative/indie push in the ‘90s was a cultural turn that emphasized cross-pollination of different rock subgenres - and most importantly - an acknowledgement of having run out of road with consumerism finally victorious over damned communism.
If the ‘90s are defined by fusing styles within rock music, the 21st century is a melding of nearly everything audible. Just as grunge fused metal, punk, and rock, subgenres like hyperpop fuse noise and pop, and blackgaze combines black metal and shoegaze. These are certainly examples of aesthetics merging but I can’t see them as innovations that merit new categorizations. Gangsta rap, drum and bass, and thrash are wholly unique at the time of their conception. Hyperpop, not so much. Remember, this isn’t to degrade the music - the music of these subgenres is fantastic. Rather, it’s to admit that we haven’t experienced a paradigm shift in music for the last five or ten years. Rockers, rappers, and ravers alike.
So if history’s over, then I guess creative musicianship is out the window too, everyone just ripping everyone else off like there’s no tomorrow - because - there’s literally no tomorrow.
Not at all.
At the same time that history stalled around the end of the Cold War, the most significant cultural event of modernity happened: the Internet. Both the end of the Cold War and the Internet are responsible for the death of specialized genres and (plot twist!) have further blurred those categories to such a degree that subgenre fails to persist. The Internet hasn’t created new subgenres, but eliminated them. While the Internet has fractured the cultural sphere into private realities, it has ultimately led to a monoculture of persistent convergence.
Space and even time are no longer dominant factors when it comes to culture because of the non-narrative of the Internet. The user-interface of Spotify or Youtube provide playlists and recommended videos that jump at lightspeed from Husker Du’s 1985 “Celebrated Summer” to Kendrick Lamar’s’ 2017 “HUMBLE.” to Joni Mitchell’s 1971 “Big Yellow Taxi”. As we’re habitualized to leaps between time and space, the leaps become greater and time smaller. Our attention-spans respond to the established pattern so that we might listen to Marvin Gaye before listening to Beyonce before listening to Prince before listening to The Guess Who. The thematics of a playlist becomes more hyperactive and diffusely spread like the DJ Girl Talk’s mash-ups of Eminem, Boston, Ludacris, The Verve and NSYNC all within a three minute track. The new subgenre is non-genre or all-genre. Whatever.
The internet has intensified our disgust with the present by giving us access to the past - Borgesian levels of nostalgia at our fingertips. Having the annals of recorded music at our fingertips results in two types of dominant contemporary music - music that doubles-down on an already established subgenre and music that disregards the constraints of subgenre by sounding like a sound collage of as many subgenres as possible. One is an embrace of subgenre and the other a pastiche of subgenres.
An album like Power Trip’s Nightmare Logic is an excellent example of music that isn’t original per se, but a perfection of the thrash metal subgenre. Nightmare Logic is a modern take on a dated musical style with established tropes and signature moves, nodding to James Hetfield’s shrieks and Kerry King’s dive bombs on guitar. I’m also thinking of Blood Orange’s 80’s synth-pop, Jessica Pratt’s intimations of ‘60s folk, White Reaper’s imitative stadium rock, Weyes Blood’s ‘70s soft rock and The War on Drugs’ Dylanesque vocal stylings. Some take these expressions as derivative, unoriginal, or even blatant rip-offs but they’re far from it. Each of these examples are artists who continue ideas of the past even if they seem like copy-cats. When it’s done right, you get a honing of the craft, but always with the new lens of their personalities and milieus flipping it into something contextually new. Power Trip for example sounds like all of the best elements of Pantera, Slayer, and Metallica distilled into an economical thrash record with precise performances, an album that’s all killer, no filler. For these artists, subgenre is the vehicle to access feeling, borrowing specific tones and styles not only to realize an emotion but to have conversations with those that came before. These musicians don’t embrace subgenre in an attempt to be uniquely creative. Instead, they’ve opted for a reverence of past excellence that is the fertile ground for aesthetic appreciation and getting your head lost in some of the most propulsive music I’ve ever heard. Bands like these are undistracted by originality and emphatic that feeling and mood is king - even if it is played at a brutal 200 bpm in the case of Power Trip.
The other music-trend in the last twenty or so years has been the synthesis of different subgenres often becoming a subgenre in it’s own right - mutating at such a rate that classifying a band or album as a particular subgenre or subgenres confuses more than it clarifies. These types of artists and records hop between genres hyperactively, as if their discography were the White Album or London Calling. Artists like The War on Drugs, Ariel Pink, Grimes’ later work, LCD Soundsystem, Angel Olsen, Tame Impala, Father John Misty, and Nilüfer Yanya either sound like a composite of styles or a jamming of genres with a key personality driving the action forward. On the wikipedia for Tame Impala’s newest record The Slow Rush, its designated genres are psychedelic pop, disco, prop pop, soft rock, and electronic. Oh, one of those records! I know exactly what that sounds like!
If artists like these are original it’s due to their ability to synthesize genres or vibes from all across the musical canon and get them to sound complementary. LCD Soundsystem will fit Terry Riley’s synthesizers alongside guitar solos out of the Talking Heads and Nigerian afro drumming. To try and peg any of these artists into a specific subgenre is a fool’s errand. Even though The War on Drugs combines Can, Springsteen, and My Bloody Valentine into a fully realized style, I can’t think of the War on Drugs as anything more than a rock band. Whether artists are making a stand on a hill of a decades old subgenre like Power Trip or serving up a stew of as many influences as possible like LCD Soundsystem, both reflect our internet-obsessions for the arcane and reject the pursuit of new subgenres.
What’s being emphasized isn’t the pushing of boundaries, the sonic barriers that Radiohead, Bjork, or Arca might be interested in breaking (a third type of music that emphasizes originality more so). What’s really original about Car Seat Headrest or Porches? Not that much I think, but these types of musicians are capable of crafting albums that dovetail into each other seamlessly, expressing a specific feeling for a specific song that an artisan might craft, a scientist might engineer. The National might not be as inventive as Joy Division, but I don’t know a better example of a song encapsulating listless depression than “Lemonworld.” The creativity is still as strong as ever, but it’s more about perfecting a vibe then it is discovering new ones.
It’s important to remember there’s always an example of this going very very wrong. Because for every Sheer Mag playing hard-edged ‘70s riff-rock for the next generation, there’s a Greta Van Fleet cashing in on the nostalgia-train with songs so bad I’d rather listen to Zeppelin records backwards - although, there’s probably something more demonic about Greta Van Fleet than any reversed record.
The reason for my litany of name-drops is to clarify that emulative music is not lesser music because it speaks to the reality of our culture instead of denying it. Forcing originality via catchy new subgenres belies our reality of nostalgia-obsession in a dying present. For those expecting something new or bemoaning the absence of a musical paradigm shift, I say listen harder. The lack of a ground-breaking genre in rock has encouraged me to branch out heavily into rap, metal, pop, and electronic music, something I imagine most rock bands are doing these days to their benefit. The convergence of opposing sounds doesn’t have to be explicit like the fusion of noise and pop in hyperpop: it can be nuanced like the Fleet Foxes’ more recent folk-experiments, Alex G’s off-the-wall indie, or the philosophical-electronica of Jenny Hval. Listening to artists like these makes it difficult to call any of them folk, indie, or electronic but their ability to obfuscate genre makes their music feel (maybe ironically) more original and reflective of the constant merging that defines modernity - even if their songs sound like two familiar genres fused together. The ‘90s alternative explosion that tried to escape the trappings of punk, metal and even melody anticipated the new internet culture where subgenres are both of no importance and the most important, where the nuances of established style converge with the possibilities of having no fixed genre to adhere to.
Rather than grieve the end of coherent musical movements or the importance of spatial music scenes, we should embrace the reality of these shifts and make something of it rather than clutching onto some spectre that only exists as memory. Acknowledging reality makes it possible to subvert it. Ignoring reality only fortifies its malevolent side.
Instead of seeing originality or technical ability as the cornerstone of great art, music fulfills its purpose when we appreciate its ability to realize an emotion. This might be a sense of melancholy, an overwhelming desire, the hilarity of a familiar situation, but all great music taps into some feeling that’s successfully translated and retains the closest unity to an artist’s emotions.
When we stop worrying about modern music breaking the mold and focus on the conviction of a sound or a cohesive ambience we can start opening up spaces for more originality to spawn as it did in the most seismic art movements of the past. This not only reins in whatever cynicism is out there about the unoriginality of modern music but gives musicians back the space to feel empowered as movers and shakers of culture, articulators of emotion.
These days with the internet kids coming up from behind, the jamming of subgenres and the rehashing of subgenres is an inevitable part of conveying modern feelings. Now that we’re able to listen to whatever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want, we’re hyper-exposed to the music of yesterday like never before. Until history gets a proper jumpstart, we’re trapped in a loop where all genres and subgenres of music are happening simultaneously. What people are drawn to more than an exciting new genre or style is a fully realized sound, a believable personality, or the chemistry of voices, players, and instruments. The legacy of musical styles has provided enough of a framework for decades and decades, be it K-pop or Motown; but until the culture is given the room to evolve, to be so out there that our existing vocabulary can’t explain it, let’s listen to the word play, the bass groove, the bars, the synth tones, the beat.
History, culture, and technology have sidelined originality for the time being. Music’s most vital feature hasn’t been originality but feeling - how it carries us away from our selves or brings us back to it. In the words of Billy Joel: “It’s the next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways / It’s still rock & roll to me.”
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Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.