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

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.

yeah but some of them turned out gay

"Free Jazz - eww. No. Make them stop"

Sadly you've gone on.

it was a really shitty proto-trump vibe to be sure (throw eminem in there too) but at least some of the preemptively defensive unwarrantedly aggrieved hetero posturing was fake ime - pop-punk and emo were like a bridge out of this for some of them/us (not to defend those gender politics either but you know) xp

and it's not like this stuff wasn't popular with the teenager girls I was hanging around with either

half the kids these days look like half the kids in those days now but I hope they have healthier attitudes towards this stuff

It's just apples and oranges to compare Country with something like Nu Metal, you're talking about a 100+ year old genre versus a 5-7 year movement (being generous in my chronology). Sure if you're a casual music fan you might say you hate it, but amongst a community of music geeks like ILM it's hard to believe enough ppl would claim to hate Jimmie Rodgers AND Bill Monroe AND Bob Wills AND Johnny Cash AND Kris Kristofferson AND Alabama AND Garth Brooks...it's just a vast enough pool of different sounds that claiming to hate it all seems weird to me.

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

lol literally no one said this, but you seem to be under the misapprehension that there is broad popular awareness of free jazz outside of places like ILX.

The popular kids in my high school were into Nu Metal.

That's surprising. Maybe it's down to where you grew up. In suburban home counties state schools it was the geeks, reticent weirdos and would-have-been goths who were into nu metal at my school/college/uni. Most nu metallers I knew were just lovely IRL and it was the jocky shiny-shirted towny pricks who would chase them through the town centre looking for a fight after the indie/rock disco closed. That said, there weren't many good dance or RnB clubs in the area really - it was all commercial meatmarkets which attracted assholes only

Were proudly racist nu-metal bands actually a thing? Because it’s certainly a thing you find in country.

That's surprising. Maybe it's down to where you grew up. In suburban home counties state schools it was the geeks, reticent weirdos and would-have-been goths who were into nu metal at my school/college/uni. Most nu metallers I knew were just lovely IRL and it was the jocky shiny-shirted towny pricks who would chase them through the town centre looking for a fight after the indie/rock disco closed. That said, there weren't many good dance or RnB clubs in the area really - it was all commercial meatmarkets which attracted assholes only

Haha yeah I'll admit rural Portugal prob not representative of most areas but in my high school it was like...for popular boys particularly, you weren't going to listen to pop or dance music because that was seen as gay. Hip-Hop was out because racism (an exception made for Eminem, of course). Indie wasn't really something anyone was aware of. So yeah, it was Nu Metal + some other older rock and metal acts (Nirvana, Metallica).

it was either nu-metal/pop-punk, or it was 50 Cent/Blazin' Squad, or it was provincial takes on donk and happy hardcore. Part of the reason me and my best pal at high school for most of it became best pals was because we had the same "uncategorisable" tastes. We were listening to stuff that people would have considered really weird and outsider, which for teenagers in a small town outside Glasgow in the early 00's meant things from the Daria and Buffy soundtracks, and Ministry Of Sound compilations.

I feel like landfill indie is kind of an unfair inclusion in this poll because it is definitionally bad music. It's taking the worst and most worthless parts of a larger genre and then calling those parts a genre unto themselves due to their badness.

Electro swing may well be the worst here, I still haven't listened to it. It didn't make sense to me to seek it out just for the purpose of building up a hatred big enough to vote in this poll.