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

I realized that I didn’t really know what Goa trance sounded like in the first year of the pandemic, and so just went to youtube and can’t relate at all to people hating this music with any vehemence. Anyway, I like this old school mix a lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpnT0rt3ZJQ

yeah I can’t hate

Does the music hypnotize goats?

love that free jazz is included in both this poll and the hip genres poll

― c u (crüt), Friday, 19 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Lol love this for free jazz.

be a bit flat if it didn't have polarising response innit

Flat Jazz

like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoP00Dz8uJY

Psy-Trance - there was a brief moment in 94/95 where Goa Trance, still showing it's EBM and New Beat roots, sounded new and exciting. Especially on acid. I still love that stuff. Within a year it had found a formula and for the past three decades psytrance has stuck rigidly, unwaveringly to that formula. Musically and culturally it seeks to emulate that one moment when it blew people's minds. It fails.

Electro-Swing - is shit, but it's not like anyone just happens across it. You'd need to hunt it out if you wanted to hear it. I've not given it a thought in over 15 years, so whatever.

Country & Western - is a massive, multifaceted genre that's been around in numerous forms for a century. You'd have to be doggedly resistant to say you hate all of it.

Opera - as above. It might not be your thing, but saying you hate it all is a big statement that suggests you don't know it very well.

Free Jazz - eww. No. Make them stop.

Happy Hardcore - a few times at multi-room raves I'd wander into a happy hardcore room. Every time it was absolute swivel eyed mayhem. For about three minutes it'd be the best thing ever. Then it became grating and I ran away.

Jump-Up Drum'n'Bass - in 96, when DnB was dominated by either floaty Bukem stuff or moody tech-step, Jump Up was like a breath of fresh air, all hiphop samples and massive basslines. It bought joy back to the DnB dancefloor. Couldn't tell you if it's still around today or what it sounds like if it is.

Indie Landfill - leave it in the landfill please.

Tech-House - 90s tech-house was wonderful. Then, around the stroke of midnight of the millennium, it turned into an inexplicable global phenomenon at the same time as becoming the most dour plodcore. The last few years it seems to have hooked up with the early trance/prog-house revival and has got good again.

Undie/Backpacker-Hop - idk what this is. I think I'll leave it that way.

Gabba - I used to know a straight edge punker who loved gabba. He'd go to gabba nights and vibrate on the dancefloor for hours. Good for him and anyone else who likes it.

Nu Metal - PE and Anthrax did the rap-metal thing so well that everything else even attempting to enter the same ballpark was utterly superfluous.

Goa/psytrance was at the cutting edge of electronic music production for a lot longer than just two years - it ran out of steam in the mid-2000s and it’s mostly a self-referencing genre at this point, but it did have an almost 15 year run of constant innovation.

You could argue that most of the innovation was being done in parallel in other genres (by people like like BT and Tipper for example). It’s not as if the psy guys were the only people to dig deep on Nord Modular / Kyma / Eventide Harmonizers etc.

xpost to spandex/general thought re:opera-
i am very hesitant to write off an entire genre/style (besides grunge, natch) but hoo boy have i struggled with opera. and i've tried a lot. i will continue to try, but yeah: not something i want to seek out.

anyway, voted numetal.

Goa/psytrance was at the cutting edge of electronic music production for a lot longer than just two years - it ran out of steam in the mid-2000s and it’s mostly a self-referencing genre at this point, but it did have an almost 15 year run of constant innovation.

― Siegbran, Saturday, 20 May 2023 20:34 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Your mileage may vary, but I guess the point I'm making is that many derided dance sub-genres were once vibrant scenes that passed their best before date.

xpost to spandex/general thought re:opera-
i am very hesitant to write off an entire genre/style (besides grunge, natch) but hoo boy have i struggled with opera. and i've tried a lot. i will continue to try, but yeah: not something i want to seek out.

― my beard exists more than i do. (Austin), Saturday, 20 May 2023 21:02 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I wouldn't say I'm an opera fan (except to that scary Italian bloke in Naples - I think I gave the right answer, as his face brightened and looked less murderous when I said "yes").

I'm told that it's a thing to see live, and the only one I have was Pirates of Penzance, which put a big smile on my face.

saw the comment about free jazz, can’t take the rest of Spandex’s post seriously as a result

Pirates of Penzance v much an operetta I think, not opera.

Free jazz is the only genre here I actually seek out;
C&W and opera will never be my focus, but I'll listen to some here and there;
I didn't know any of the songs on the top 50 indie landfill list, and I'm not curious;
I might dislike examples of these electronic genres, but I don't know enough from the names to tell them apart;
That leaves nu-metal as the only one for which I have specific negative feelings.

Enough beer and sausage and you might find yourself pogoing around to some polka. That is true of quite a bit of party music, the right vibe and buzz - it works where you would never listen to it straight.

i think polka suffers from its association with lawrence welk... i find it to be a vibrant and engaging form of dance music. there's a comp i like called _deeper polka: dance music from the midwest_.

i once heard from an acquaintance (who was fairly well versed on all things folky/rootsy) that they preferred mexican norteño bandas because it was "like polka, but with better melodies." can anybody weigh in on that?

(also don't mean to be offensively ignorant, but to my untrained ears there is a lot of musical similarity between polka and norteño music)

https://www.expatinsurance.com/articles/polka-influence-on-mexican-music

i thought everyone knew this? it’s all in the wiki, check the section called “history”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norteño_(music)

well that didn’t work so hot, but from the section on “history”

Emperor Maximilian I brought European music to México. By 1864 he had accumulated marching bands and musicians to entertain him. When Maximilian's empire was defeated, many of his former soldiers and fellow countrymen fled north and dispersed into what is now the southwestern United States. Norteño music developed from a blending of Mexican and Spanish oral and musical traditions, military brass band instrumentation, and Germanic musical styles such as polka and waltz.[citation needed]

European immigrants from Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic to northern Mexico and the southwestern United States also brought dance traditions such as the varsovienne. The focus on the accordion in the music of their home countries was integrated into Mexican music, and the instrument is essential in the genre today. It was called norteño because it was most popular in the northern regions of Mexico.

https://www.expatinsurance.com/articles/polka-influence-on-mexican-music

― Day 1 fan (morrisp), Sunday, May 21, 2023 8:28 AM

i thought everyone knew this? it’s all in the wiki, check the section called “history”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norteño_(music)

― the late great, Sunday, May 21, 2023 8:29 AM

thx!

(and no, not everyone knows this stuff. some of us were raised in extremely racist environments where showing any sort of interest in this kind of thing was grounds for punishment)

you should have just played it off, like “i am researching debased forms in order to prove the inherent superiority of pure germanic polka”

-1000 NO TALKING BACK OR EXPLAINING YOURSELF

but seriously, the correlation/influence is f'kin rad and metaphorically spits in the face of racist assholes everywhere. what's not to love?

i do like Norteño a lot though i haven't heard much, honestly the only album i really know is Volé, Soñé Y La Ame by Norteño 4.5 but it's good!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Winner no surprise
But 10 votes for C&W?

Lots of people hate country and western - this is a thing and always has been.

I assume the people who are surprised about this are the same ones who think free jazz has broad popular appeal outside of places like ILX

it’s not weird ten ppl dislike c&w, it’s weird ten ppl dislike it more than electro swing!

There were at least that many people who weren't familiar with electro swing before this poll.

It’s weird that people on a music nerd board like this dislike a genre as great as Country, yeah

Not sure how the Free Jazz thing follows

It’s weird that people on a music nerd board like this dislike a genre as great as Country, yeah

A lot of people living in the current USA view country music as politically about half a step to the left of black metal.

It seems like the genre that most ppl voting in a poll like this would at least like or two songs from, though.

(even if just Dolly Parton songs or whatever)

Every once in a while I'll hear some country I like, but I still voted for it because it's the only genre on the list that can bring out immediate hatred from me. The rest I'm either fine with or at worst indifferent to.

really? the only one???

i'm just thinking of my numetal vote -- i literally can't think of a single redeeming quality in that shit. i'm far from a country fan (and yes, a lot of current country is very trashy and revolting), but i can still find enjoyable things in the genre without looking very hard.

i suppose everything here has a worst possibility that obscures the potentially redeeming things.

(not to rag on you too much, moodles. i'm just a little salty that numetal didn't walk this)

I mean, I personally would actively choose to listen to stuff like System of a Down or Deftones, I never choose to listen to country.

Somewhat guiltily voted for landfill indie only because I don't think I'll expect anything ever good to come out of it in the future.

Make fun of opera if you dare: out of all of these choices, opera is the only one that actually instigated a revolution and secession La muette de Portici and the Belgian Revolution of 1830)

Nu metal has, like, five absolute jams.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/ce76e3eba3a6029d423969c885ced766/3289d0b932285bae-42/s540x810/738152ba146626912b935f6925ba1502872d6f6a.jpg

that "Fool Britania" song is the worst thing I've ever heard and my boyfriend left the room because it was making him ill when I hit Play on it

I am naturally suspicious of electro-swing fans because the romantic nostalgia for pre-war era culture says to me they're interested in a world where women, POC and LGBT+ had no visibility or rights.

worse a version of the 20s-30s where queer black people weren't central to the cultural movements this music is pretending to draw from

nu-metal in 2002 felt like it had the WORST fans. In Glasgow in the early 00s you could go to the "unders" at clubs and it was either the one for cool kids playing r&b and dance, or it was the one for "outsiders" playing music on the "goffs/moshas" axis of alternative. As I was both gay and an academic geek I was never cool, so by default I hung around with the folk going to the latter. It was always just the most masculine, whiny, entitled douchebags, people who were bitter and angry that they weren't automatically cool and their parents wouldn't give them as much pocket money as they wanted. Just as exclusionary and reactionary as everyone else could be towards me and people like me, but it felt worse because their subculture was based on not being accepted.

These people were all into the same cultural totems - Limp Bizkit nu-metal, the deliberate cruelty of Jackass, quoting Cartman because they thought it was funny rather than realising it was meant to be horrific. I think you could make a tenuous argument for this as the breeding ground of the origins of incel culture.