…when you have stuff like this:
When listening to this music you should keep in mind artists such as Frederic Chopin, Cat Power, Keith Jarrett, Talk Talk, and Chris Whitley — unless you don’t know any [of] them or are not a fan, in which case you should keep in mind Nick Drake, The National, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, and other, trendier bands whose music has recently appeared in car commercials.
That said, I am totally holding out for a hero.
But seriously, is trading in category labels for genealogies of influence a practical alternative to the genre tag in an Internet age?
Absolutely. I don’t even know what label you might use to describe that music, but I can begin to imagine what the music might sound like by thinking about the artists in those lists.
Labels are broad, and don’t always mean the same thing to different people. (Jethro Tull? Hard Rock/Metal?) But even when an artist’s style varies, there’s something specific and distinct about the music that tells me much more than a broad label.
When I ran a little indie record label, telling people about one of my artists, Amy X Neuburg, it was more effective using other artists as reference points than trying to describe her sound. Saying it was electronic pop with vocals left people thinking “Laurie Anderson”; mentioning that Amy’s influences included XTC and Frank Zappa suggested the humor and experimentation in her recordings.
Kristi
(“You sound like Air Supply meets GWAR – in a good way” – Kevin Gilbert, “Suit Fugue”)
It’s hardly new – read any pop/rock journalism from the 60’s or later, or a jazz criticism, and a great deal of time is spent situating an artist genealogically. this really shouldn’t be surprising, since what is commonly referred to as ‘genre’ isn’t really genre in it’s usage in a western art music tradition – the distinctions the term is used to organize are far more stylistic, and far more permeable and prone to re-negotiation.
at least it avoids the trap of thinking of ‘genre’ as a classical categorization– often composer/musician names are simply used as a stand in for feature or technique, and so allow for Familienähnlichkeit to be taken seriously.
A real problem, though, is that said genealogy is so often simply an assertion; we run the risk of taking posture as something more, or of allowing (necessary) descriptive language to crowd out history.