There are "genre novels" and "genre films". Is there "genre music"?

Top of my mind reggaeton - and reggae, ska, rocksteady and dancehall for the most part - are usually very confined to genre standards and most importantly rhythmic standards. If you deviate too much from let’s say in reggaeton from the dembow riddim you’re not in the genre’s boundaries anymore.

This video explaining the same chord progression but in ska, rocksteady and reggae rhythms is what I’m trying to exemplify:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0YCChML0S4

If you play it slowly it’s suddenly not ska anymore, play it with a quick two strum pattern and it’s reggae. You are somewhat constrained into the genre by it’s rhythmic patterns… but then again… most music genres are?

Maybe I didn’t get op’s question haha

Ska is definitely disreputable, I’ll give you that.

i feel like i listen to a lot of techno that is 'genre' techno, in that it is from a label/artists with an insane amount of output and it feels like filler yet here i am listening to it. something like semantica or hypnus records or artists like ASC. plenty of things transcend but it feels created in a niche.

of course there is also a lot of genre techno that is worse than filler you see floating around looking for a hit, but just like i'm more likely to read an Abercrombie genre fantasy than like Warhammer, those things still fit that mode.

i feel like when i listened to 764-hero in 2001 it was basically genre northwest emo

Back in the days of peak dubstep there were whole ongoing forum threads arguing about what did and what didn't count as dubstep. I think the main thing was that it almost unequivocally had to be at 140bpm or people got aggy

These are good examples of "genre music" in the sense of music that conforms closely to genre tropes. But they're missing the second thing I had in mind, the critical disreputability.

fwiw I don't think it's true in the least to say that genre fiction or genre films are critically disreputable in 2021, we've had decades of tastemakers reassessing these and the "critical disreputability" thing is at this point more of a historical leftover from the days when there were far fewer critics and much more of a monoculture around what "quality" means.

So to that point, all popular music is genre music because the non-genre stuff within that mindset is classical music.

ASC put out an album and two EPs last year where the whole thinking behind them was "I Am Now Making 90s Drum 'n' Bass." I bought them; they were very good.

I'm reminded of a thought I had about how some artists are mercurial and follow their own paths as self invention. But leave recognisable landmarks along the way.But there are lesser artists who see the value of that particular nexus and spend their careers investigating what the possibilities of that particular point are or develop their own sense of self invention based in it.
It was something I inferred about general human interface from reading a good book about tghe development of computer interface The inmates are running the asylum by Alan Cooper though it may have occurred to me independently before that.