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

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.

Jimmie Rodgers AND Bill Monroe AND Bob Wills AND Johnny Cash AND Kris Kristofferson AND Alabama AND Garth Brooks

This is not what people on ILM are talking about when they are talking about country music, though, and you know it. It's like saying to someone who hates indie rock, "Oh, you hate Chuck Berry?" When people are talking about country music on ILM they're either talking about Miranda Lambert (yay!) or Morgan Wallen (boo!). There is prelapsarian country music I like — Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam, Loretta Lynn. But 21st century country music is a poisoned well.

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.

― boxedjoy

I'm always a bit sceptical of this sort of rendering of people who are into specific eras - I personally love a lot of 1920s avant-garde stuff without being into fascism, the majority of steampunks don't like Victoriana b/c they love imperialism, a lot of art from particular eras is specifically AGAINST the reigning political climate, etc etc - but knowing the sort of demographic who are into electro-swing I actually fully believe that this is a part of the appeal for them.

Also I always associated nu-metal fans with jocks - it wasn't the same alternative crowd who actually were weird outsiders, it was for jocks who wanted to rock out without any of the 'icky' queerness or femininity that other rock acts might have.

THen the category should have been "Bro Country" or "Contemporary Country" or something.

It's like saying to someone who hates indie rock, "Oh, you hate Chuck Berry?"

Oh yes, it's exactly like this.

I'll freely admit that there may well be more good country than there is good stuff in a lot of these other categories. The difference for me is that I'm vastly more likely to encounter shitty country out in the wild than most of these other genres, and the shitty side of it gets my back up in a way that these others just don't.

xp lol er, yeah. I think most non-US posters associate country with Daniel's list.

The Morgan Wallen thread has 250 posts since 2021. Looks like most was posted last week due to recent events.

with electroswing it's not about the social or political elements of the music and the culture that birthed it - it's just taking "old-timey" music and making it into novelty dance music. In my experience people who are into this stuff are not into any "Proper Dance Music" at all and I think that's very revealing

i was in middle school during the nu-metal era and IME it was definitely for the maladjusted outsider kids

see: any photo of Slipknot
see also: Linkin Park's anime music video

nu-metal was basically for failed jocks, in my orbit at least. This perspective is probably shaped by the geography of local tastes as well as my own experience as a gay teenager in a small town. Donk and happy hardcore were seen as music for "wee bams", you'd have called them "chavs" down south, and that was a huge part of the tribalism of taste that shaped the social identities of teenagers here, but obviously these types of dance music were not popular in eg London, the way they were here

Nu Metal was after my school days, so I mostly know it through Woodstock 99 and seeing Fred Durst jocking around.

I would have had infinitely more fun dancing to DJ Cammy and DJ Rankin than I ever did trying not get caught in a moshpit to Korn but I would never have been welcome in the space where that was played. It's just that I was also not ever really welcome in the other space where it felt like I should have belonged, and that to me is almost worse for it's disingenuity - you had to be the right kind of outsider to belong to the outsider tribe

btw I don't think any of the radio stations where you guys are hearing Rascal Flatts or whoever brand themselves as "Country & Western" anymore, as there is very little Western Swing influence in Contemporary Country. So the poll option itself seems to more about the 20th century form of the music.

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.

Boxedjoy, no offense but I think you're overanalyzing. My gay son was actually the one who brought electro-swing to my attention, knowing that I have a love of old jazz and virtually no knowledge of current EDM. He would certainly have nothing to do with the nostalgia or the scene you're describing. The shows we saw together were filled with young, arty crowds, a good number of whom I would assume were LGBT+.

there was a weird generational thing where my year at uni were all post-britpop or clubbers or w/e and then maybe two years younger everyone had tatoos and piercings and skateboarded and listened to nu metal and ska punk. I remember going to reading festival one year and realising I was absolutely surrounded by them. then I saw them bottle Daphne & Celeste offstage and decided once and for all that these people and their music could all fuck right off.

All your nu-metal perspectives are hilarious to me because they are so clearly the viewpoints of pop-oriented teens. "Ooh, that aggro music for meathead jocks! No, we don't like that at all!" When nu-metal arrived, I was firmly ensconced in the world of Actual Metal (Motörhead, Slayer, Cannibal Corpse etc.) and Korn, Limp Bizkit, et al. were seen as music for p_ssies and f@gs. "Oh, your daddy didn't love you? THAT'S NOT METAL. FUCK OFF." *plays "Hammer Smashed Face" on a loop for an hour*

you had to be the right kind of outsider to belong to the outsider tribe

This has been my experience across the spectrum with every genre of non-popular (and popular!) music I’ve enjoyed.

I have a feeling ILM might be the wrong place to ask for a true opinion on the hopes, dreams and opinions of Electro-Swing audiences are. In this thread, descriptions range from "music for estate agents" to "cabaret burlesque festival types", so which is it to be (maybe there's a Venn crossover between these two but I somehow doubt it)

At my school jocks were not into stuff like Slayer.