Maligned Genres aka "I like everything except..."

Left, seems like nu metal (and metal generally) are notoriously sausagey. Remove masculinity and you have like, uh, one and a half bands?

Unless there is a secretly thriving underground scene of female nu metal that has escaped our collective notice.

I don't know how many made it big but it seemed like there were a lot of bands following the Evanescence wake, Flyleaf etc. (and, uh, Taylor Momsen?)

If one has to scratch one's head and come up with potentially three or four counterexamples, that kinda makes my point for me, doesn't it?

Like, many people could name a half dozen or potentially a dozen female-fronted metal bands, okay, yay, go you. Cool. Put a pin in that.

Then set it against ten thousand white dudes in cargo shorts screaming into an SM57 while a different ten thousand white dudes play power chords on a distorted Ibanez.

Identifying a few outliers in a sea of sameness doesn't exactly negate said sea. See?

Finding it hard to disagree with that entirely, although there are plenty of women in metal (including nu metal).

Couldn't this argument be leveled at pretty much any genre though? Isn't this one of the big topics in music over the last ten years - that women are under represented in so many genres?

Dog latin, my experience has been that folk and trad music, and children's music, are not nearly as lopsided.

We just had a pretty fun poll thread on women in country and almost everyone found out about an artist they were previously unaware of.

I don't even know much about music, but could probably come up with a decent number of utterly entrancing female artists who do traditional English/Irish/Scottish stuff. Without even brushing the surface of Americana / Ameripolitan / Countrypolitan artists.

But I could not say the same for metal / nu metal / classic rock / punk / hardcore. Sorry, those genres are 90% sausage, and it's okay to say so.

I think I would rather listen to mopey “indie landfill” than icky beery “garage rock” or “budget rock” ick just me personally

N o S D

electro swing is absolutely the worst of these no contest, every track i have heard in that genre is unbearably cringe. everything else is at least somewhat defensible.

i'm not a nu metal guy but it seems to me it's not even in the bottom 3 or 4 here. i think generally the worst of these are the most narrowly defined & gimmicky. the broader the tradition / genre the better.

I think I've so far avoided electro swing, this is the first that I've been aware of its existence, but no one here has convinced me I should go seek it out.

^^ same

"I like REAL country music"

-- guy who discovered Johnny Cash in college via the American Recordings and then branched out into Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, both of which were dead ends

Average people wouldn't say they like everything except polka, they'd choose something commercial and surface level that they're overexposed to and prejudiced against, like reggaeton. I don't really have one like that sticking out like a sore thumb.
Then there's this broad class of genres that escape critical discourse. You'd never see a review of a Schlager record. The music just is, as a tradition, or for immediate consumption, it's not really art, it has zero crossover appeal. It feels like it's cheating to pick them.
And all the genres I don't regularly listen to.
Leading me to choice paralysis over a simple enough question.

Free Jazz is inaccessible to a lot of ppl but if they're aware of it and don't dig it they're more likely to blame it on their own lack of sophistication than the music I think.

Landfill Indie feels a bit cheating because do those bands truly sound very identifiable and not just like the continuation of a dreary Indie tradition?

I think the same thing holds for backpacker Hip-Hop that was the case for early ILM's aversion to rock and indie - it's not that the haters truly thought all of it was shit, they just thought more interesting stuff was being done elsewhere and enjoyed deflating the pomposity.

Glad consensus seems to be Electro Swing, truly the most wretched bullshit.

Then there's this broad class of genres that escape critical discourse. You'd never see a review of a Schlager record. The music just is, as a tradition, or for immediate consumption, it's not really art, it has zero crossover appeal. It feels like it's cheating to pick them.

Haha in the Anglo-American press maybe, but in Germany, Sweden, etc. "I like all kinds of music except schlager" is 100% a thing ppl say. Especially since the demographics for it line up neatly with those for Country in the US.

Polka is fine! Might as well get angry at bel canto or Irish folk music or something.

Ages ago I was trying to decide what the best-known 'polka' songs in the UK are and I came up with the Birdie Song and Wooden Heart. Which suggests to me that like jugband and zydeco we take it as a bedrock for novelty.

I would assume the relative popularity of polka in the US is down to immigration from Central Europe and Germany.

so jealous of the people here who have managed to avoid Electro-Swing, though when i come to think of it I think I have only ever heard it in England, so could it be a peculiarly English abomination?

nah, played at a wedding in France I went to

North American folks might have an easier time avoiding, when I showed a Canadian friend what I was talking about she asked "so was this a steampunk wedding?"

I'm english and I have no clue what this stuff is, is it like mambo no 5?

does anyone dislike Free Jazz? What a crazy world!!

― stirmonster, Tuesday, 16 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Most people -- even ppl with a passing acquaintance with jazz -- aren't going to know of it.

If you like a lot of experimental music and don't like free jazz I'd say you are posturing.

Put me down for I've no idea what electro-swing is too.

left, as mentioned above, no speak americano was the "crossover" hit

enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHEpgsjknCs

the best that can be said about this music is that at times it vaguely resembles a vastly inferior version of the kind of music you get in the casino zones of sonic games

Just looked up the electro swing playlist on Spotify and I am regretting voting for Jump Up DnB

Doop must have been the first electro-swing tune surely

Doop is good, though

yes, the only ever good one

Ok @ electro-swing. I just have never heard this. Sounds like something that could be played in a chain resraurant.

Also don't know what "Jump-Up Drum'n'Bass" is, like, how is it different from normal DnB?

Lol Doop ok - that's good

does anyone have examples of electro-swing that is good (besides Doop)? I like the idea in theory, but every example I've heard is so corny

this stuff doesn't swing at all and it's not electro so what are we doing here

I like disco era stuff that has a swing/jazz age influence, like Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band or Tena's Song by Foxy, and there's new wave/synth stuff that has a similar vibe, and latin/samba stuff like Blue Rondo à la Turk or Matt Bianco is more self-consciously 'old-timey' dance music with a modern twist - it should be possible to do this so it sounds good?

oh i just had a realisation maybe this is the electro-swing equivalent of proto punk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNAYyUJ3tQA

We No Speak Americano also feels less objectionable than most. On Dan P's tip above I checked out Caravan Palace live, but I can't get past the immediate cringe. It feels like it starts from the cosplay and builds up from there.

if it was all like the donna summer track I'd love it

don't know the others mentioned but dr buzzards sound like they're actually bringing a deep love and understanding for the older music to then-modern sounds but (based on skipping around that youtube for a few mins) the old timey stuff there sounds like obnoxious window dressing and the beats are just nothing

Think it's also that Disco comes at Swing via camp, Broadway, a queer nightclub culture continuum that was still within living memory at the time. Electro swing producer's first memories of this stuff are probably the same as my own, i.e. old cartoons, and their music follows suit.

(nb the swing in old cartoons is awesome don't get me wrong)

so jealous of the people here who have managed to avoid Electro-Swing, though when i come to think of it I think I have only ever heard it in England, so could it be a peculiarly English abomination?

I was just in Berlin and passing through Dreiecks-Beete Fernsehturm there was a small charity fair sort of thing going on but with two dancers on a stage showing off gymnastic moves to some electroswing. The dancers were good at least!

Re: disco, there was a lot of 40s revivalism going on in fashion in the 1970s and the music of the time would come with it.

Yeah, "1970's doing 1940's" a whole movie subgenre too.

Electro swing producer's first memories of this stuff are probably the same as my own, i.e. old cartoons, and their music follows suit.

like Betty Boop/Max Fleischer stuff?

this bit on the Betty Boop wiki page was interesting in the distinction it draws between the flapper/jazz era and the swing era, electro-swing probably collapses all this into one thing I guess?

When the flapper/jazz era that Betty represented had been replaced by the big bands of the swing era, Fleischer Studios made an attempt to develop a replacement character in this style in the 1938 Betty Boop cartoon Betty Boop and Sally Swing, but it was not a success.

The last Betty Boop cartoons were released in 1939, and a few made attempts to bring Betty into the swing era. In her last appearance, Rhythm on the Reservation (1939), Betty drives an open convertible, labeled "Betty Boop's Swing Band", through a Native American reservation, where she introduces the people to swing music and creates a "Swinging Sioux Band".

there the 70s jazz age/20s/art deco revival as well with Redford/Farrow Great Gatsby film.

Xanadu feels more specifically 1940s, maybe?

the thing that elevates electro-swing from "dull music" to "abomination" is the way it erases the (obviously amazing and important) swing era and replaces it with this insipid middle class costume party bullshit, trampling over 20s jazz at the same time because they neither know nor care that it's not the same thing. I know that this process isn't by any means confined to this fairly obscure genre, but it's like, that's all there is to it! literally nothing else to see here!

Jump-Up, as I understand it, is the term for DnB that came out around the late 90s when it was more about lumpen kick-snare rhythms (as opposed to breaks or more complex rhythms), enormous builds and drops, pretty much the precursor to brostep.

Just been going through a Spotify Jump Up playlist, and the first track pretty much sums up what I'm thinking. It's kind of exciting for 2 minutes and then I just find it exhausting and annoying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANx0CIhtF6s

I love lots of that stuff, never heard it called "jump-up" before though.

Doop must have been the first electro-swing tune surely

i also loathe Doop which stole it's idea from Cajmere & Dajae -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4kcG-jeTCI

I actively enjoy the way our shared culture just sometimes gets these nigh-inexplicable fascinations that arise, spread, and suddenly vanish.

Feature, not bug imo.

Like tulipomania or that time in the 90s when Gregorian chants were a thing. Or that other time in the 90s when a very specific funhouse mirror vision of swing was briefly popular if - and only if - you had the word "Daddy" in your band name (Big Bad Voodoo Cherry Poppin etc.).

In about 1994 I was working for a magazine and someone wrote me a very earnest letter that began, "The problem with most vegan hardcore bands is..."

Until precisely that moment I hadn't known that vegan hardcore was a sufficiently established genre. So finding out that a human being could identify trends and systemic problems in it was also a surprise. My colleagues and I tried, but failed, to invent and popularize other diet-based music genres. Ovo-lacto disco, carnivorous reggae, macrobiotic punk.

xposts I do remember 'Jump Up' being used in the mid 90s too referring to (iirc) the particularly rushy Amen-heavy stuff

I'm particularly keen on it but Electro Swing is pretty harmless retro-fodder in my book. Same ballpark as Rockabilly revivalist music.

A few of these are holdovers from when a certain style was super popular with adolescents and absolutely inescapable - for example, Nu-metal and Happy Hardcore/Gabber were a punchline, but have been all but dead for nearly two decades now, it's like the "dead as Disco" joke, it was very specific to a certain point in time.

Opera, Death Metal, Free Jazz etc all have some inaccessibility to the sonic/complexity aspect of it. Psy-trance with all the sensory-overload of eastern-scale melodies probably has this problem too.

Hip-hop hatred always seems to work on a generation-specific subset - geriatric soul/disco fans hate all of it, oldschool heads from the 80s don't like anything G-Funk or later (hence, the backpacker stuff), the generation that grew up with Wu-Tang and Jay-Z still shits on autotune rappers, etc.

All from my POV obviously.

Edit: I'm not particularly keen on Electro Swing, etc.

does anyone have examples of electro-swing that is good (besides Doop)?

Mr. Scruff's Get a Move On is another arguable originator and that's very good.