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

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.

it was for jocks who wanted to rock out without any of the 'icky' queerness

well joke’s on them for listening to korn i guess

In my experience growing up, any sort of rock-oriented music up through school/college/uni was seen as a bit outsidery and leftfield and for weirdos. Even indie rock. Cool people definitely didn't listen to metal.

It was the jocks getting in shiny shirts and too much hair gel drinking Red Square and trying to fondle women in the mainstream pop and dance clubs before starting a fight outside.

Nu-Metal music might have had a macho, bratty side to it, and sure there are always going to be arseholes in every scene, but generally speaking nu-metal as a scene was the same as any other alternative rock scene at the time - the latest in the parade after grunge and before emo.

Also, it definitely seemed to attract more women than much of the metal that had come before it.

Can't believe I'm defending nu-metal, but this is just my experience. Geeks in ill-fitting jeans jumping around and letting loose Vs mainstream dunderheads in clothes from Burton menswear acting like twats

"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)

Considering most of my experience with cabaret burlesque festival types is rich kids dicking about on drugs and having a dabble in the 'exotic' world of theatricality, there definitely is overlap. I do know a few queer/outsider burlesquers but honestly the majority are super fucking privileged normies.

seen as music for p_ssies and f@gs

Well, you sound lovely.

yeah unperson, I think it's probably fair to say that modern 21st century country is what ppl on ILM mean when they talk about country on, well, contemporary country threads, but considering this list was posted by a Brit and no one here knows wtf a Miranda Lambert or Morgan Wallen is, I think it's a crazy assumption that this is What We Were All Talking About. To riposte to your Chuck Berry comment, your stance is like assuming that if I say "jazz" I obviously mean Esperanza Spalding.

To be fair to everyone else, I probably sound like I'm massively gatekeeping 'the weirdo kids' right now, which isn't great on my part. But I was right about Grimes. I WAS RIGHT ABOUT GRIMES!

xp to myself

so we were supposed to assume that the country inclusion on here was not meant to cover anything from the last 20+ years?

re: the nu metal discussion, again just personal experience but fwiw the fact that Nu Metal lyrics and videos were very much about the angsty outsider didn't give the popular jocks in my class any cognitive dissonance - teens are moody regardless of social status, and they could easily apply that angst to anger at their parents, teachers, girlfriend, etc.

then again my high school dynamics weren't as cartoonishly hierarchical as the US/UK archetype often seems

Moodles, no, I would assume it includes everything from the last 20 years and everything before that, too. which is why it's a crazy option imo.

^OTM

To riposte to your Chuck Berry comment, your stance is like assuming that if I say "jazz" I obviously mean Esperanza Spalding.

Or that “rock” can’t possibly include Led Zep & AC/DC… it can only mean Avenged Sevenfold, I Prevail, and whatever else is on the Mainstream Rock chart this week.

Well, you sound lovely.

Suburban NJ in the late '80s and early '90s was another world.

Also, it definitely seemed to attract more women than much of the metal that had come before it.

Which was another strike against it among True Metal Brothers, of course.

i think it’s weird that on a board 1) with so much professed anti capitalism 2) where we tie ourselves in knots trying to separate art and artist, so many ppl are invested in making choices re: cultural consumption based on broad assumptions about (the rest of) the audience, and then confuse those consumer choices with actual politics

Many XPS to emil.y

It's two different types of rich kids though non? Trustafarian runaways who spend their whole summer in a van going from small festival to small festival Vs, well, "yuppies".

But anyway, this is splitting hairs.

I agree that a kneejerk "I do not like this thing and therefore it is problematic and the people who like it must luuurve racism and homophobia" isn't always a useful or charitable approach.

Like you say, it's okay to appreciate and take enjoyment from aspects of art from the past without being all-in on problems to do with that era. By that standard, one could just as well say that any 90s rave-influenced dance music is problematic because it elides the Gulf war and the AIDS pandemic (or something).

Still, there is something annoyingly icky about Electro-Swing. Maybe I just don't enjoy cosplay?

fwiw the fact that Nu Metal lyrics and videos were very much about the angsty outsider didn't give the popular jocks in my class any cognitive dissonance - teens are moody regardless of social status, and they could easily apply that angst to anger at their parents, teachers, girlfriend, etc.

correct. and this paragraph could just as easily be about nirvana

I just want to say that as a Black kid in the 70s and 80s growing up in the exurbs of the Twin Cities, the country audience I knew was extremely good ol’ boy Confederate flag-waving racist so there’s a strong negative association with even the good country artists for me

not saying we should uncritically digest michael bay movies, but seems like most ilxors have better reasons for disliking those movies (if they dislike them in the first place) than their feelings about the fanbase!

I think it's weird that people's feeling are hurt because 10 people said they don't like country

I can't think of a single genre that I would be saddened to learn is an ilxor's least favorite. I feel pretty confident that just about everything I listen to is someone's least favorite on here.

Limp Bizkit's Greatest Hitz is a bit of fun until it gets to the Results May Vary material, can't knock em that.

just because people are judging you, it doesn’t mean their feelings are hurt

(Ditto the metal heads, and pretty much anyone who didn’t listen to some form of pop music. Don’t get me wrong, the pop fans also had racists, but the likelihood that someone who also liked pop was a racist was much lower than the people who aggressively didn’t like pop, which shaped a large number of my preconceptions as I wandered into genres more removed from pop music)

lol, got it, I have been judged

not just judged, but found lacking!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi0fq7Zosa0

from a very early korn show where the band are wearing masks and john davis is dressed like every trans girl i know in 2023. regarding the real/false metal dichotomy unperson brings up i assume because it's such a bad and stupid dichotomy (proud pussy and fag here), they were way closer to pantera at this point than you'd think

so we were supposed to assume that the country inclusion on here was not meant to cover anything from the last 20+ years?

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Tuesday, May 23, 2023 3:45 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The point of the thread was to list genres which, in my time, I commonly hear people say they really don't like. And often this comes from a place of wilful ignorance.

It's likely that people who say they hate country and western, only have a very limited knowledge of the style. Maybe they associate it with linedancing classes their parents used to take, for example, and they just think it's really lousy and uncool.

Listeners from countries outside of the US will have a totally different take on country than those within too. It's not as prevalent or even all that relevant. I think maybe my dad's generation might have encountered it more than mine. In the eighties and nineties it was seen as a form of old-person easy listening music on a par with New Age, and only in recent decades has it become cool again with the Nashville TV show, Taylor Swift, Johnny Cash's American Recordings etc....

it’s ok, i will lower my standards, now that i know you’re a nu metal listener. grading on a curve, so to speak

I'm not a Nirvana "fan" by any stretch, I only really know the hits and enjoy them to varying degrees, but there's definitely a world of difference between Cobain and Durst, even if the same demographic found the same use of their music in establishing their own identity as listeners and as community. I think Cobain would have been horrified by what the grunge continuum evolved into

regarding the real/false metal dichotomy unperson brings up i assume because it's such a bad and stupid dichotomy (proud pussy and fag here), they were way closer to pantera at this point than you'd think

It was extremely stupid. I mean, just a few years later I remember being at a metal festival in Asbury Park the week Rob Halford came out and the conversations around that were uniformly along the lines of, "Well, everybody knew that, and who cares? Rob Halford's awesome."

I'm sure there are people out there who've had terrible experiences at clubs with douchebros soundtracked by tech-house who would consider it as the worst music ever, and no amount of bangers I could post would change their mind because they'll never strip it of personal context. I love that Brad is able to quickly find a video of Korn that suggests an intention different to my experience of them as a listener in a social context, but this music is still always going to sound like being called a [SLUR] by boys who reek of Lynx Africa

I was just out of high school when nu metal hit and a lof the experiences here seem very foreign to me. Like the jocks at my high school were not listening to korn. The jocks when I grew were all pop rap listeners for sure, with some pop/country/cancon mixed in maybe.

I stopped doing the "this is music for this kind of person" thing when I started loving music that I knew for a fact was made for an audience I wouldn't like (lots of 80's AOR boomer rock, for example)*. As I've said before, my hatred of electro swing has literally nothing to do with its perceived audience, and I like plenty of stuff that could be viewed as reactionary/nostalgic in the way it's been cast here. Frankly I'd stopped feeling strongly enough about music genres to truly hate them long ago (individual tracks could still get me going, but not genres), and so in a way I gotta kinda hand it to electro swing - it's the first thing in over a decade that just awakens instant violent revulsion in me.

*obvious caveat that I was also not at the receiving hand of bigotry from these ppl so totally understand why others would continue to dislike certain genres on that basis

I think Durst had a lot to answer for. It was primarily him and his lyrics that indicated nu metal as a bratty, jocky "fuck everything, break stuff" genre.

Like listening to RATM and extrapolating only the "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" part.

There was nothing social, personal or political about most of their music beyond "here is a license to be a big jerk", which I can actually see why it was popular with a lot of teenagers who hadn't evolved a social consciousness yet - just uncontrolled internal and external rage to an extent.

I wonder how Nu Metal would be seen today if Limp Bizkit hadn't existed. I feel as though Korn and Deftones at least had something more to say?

but there's definitely a world of difference between Cobain and Durst

i mean, yes, absolutely, nirvana was a very smart band and limp bizkit is one of the dumbest bands of all time and the only way to truly enjoy them is to admit to yourself that you are as dumb as the dumbest motherfucker on earth and that's ok. but korn started earlier, they defined the sound of the genre years before limp bizkit was a twinkle in durst's floridian eye, and even if every member of korn is straight as fuck (afaik they are!) what they did reads as undeniably queer to me, and they made music about getting bullied and getting horribly abused by your family, no matter how the eventual audience contorted it to suit their overclocked testosterone levels or whatever it doesn't change the text or how much queer ppl like me responded to in the moment

and this is why the argument that nu-metal fandom and incel culture are related is actually incredibly specious to me. about as meaningful as saying the violent femmes inspired incel culture

I have walked down a nearly empty college hall where a steriod-scarred jock hummed "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" to himself under his breath not knowing I was behind him. I have idled at the only stoplight in a small town next to a black man blasting country from his pickup truck. Given the platinum profits of Nu Metal, people from multiple levels of the adolescent hierarchy took succor in it's angst. Who among us doesn't need a self-pitying song now and then (or almost always), best served by whatever pop is available to them in the hour of need!

Brad otm

Brad OTM

I may be in the minority here but Limp Bizkit's best stuff holds up for me, there's so much energy to it and I think it's stupid in a way that is really fun. I don't really like nu-metal but if you're gonna do it I think you gotta do it at that tempo. at the same time its wild that I actually remember a time when this was like the most popular stuff in the country, it feels like an alternate universe now. do the teens of today have some kind of semi-ironic appreciation of "Nookie" and "Rollin" now the same way my generation was with stuff like "Hungry Like the Wolf" ??

judging from my own large adult child's interest in the genre, I'd say the answer is yes

dunno about semi-ironic but I think a lot of the ppl loving Nu Metal in 2023 are Gen Z, not sure about the Bizkit specifically

xpost

With some distance, 'Rollin' is a banger, I must admit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHmgNDo5rqA

i feel like most people have only heard the "faith" cover but the energy captured on the bizkit debut is like... i can't believe the sound they were making didn't destroy the studio

just because people are judging you, it doesn’t mean their feelings are hurt

― the late great, Tuesday, May 23, 2023 7:57 AM (twenty-seven minutes ago)

- Kurt Cobain

xp 'Clunk' and 'Everything' are good'uns iirc.

Limp Bizkit are imo an example of a band with an often irritating centre but fascinating stuff in the peripherals. That's the other members, Wes mostly, but also the way their albums tend to veer off on strange and sometimes compelling tangents. As I said the Greatest Hitz is mostly a lot of fun for the first ten songs but it misses out e.g. the lurid atmospheric jams on the first album or nice ideas courtesy of the hip hop end of the group (both parts of the Outro on Significant Other). All this stuff is sabotaged, which makes it even more interesting.

Bizkit, Korn, Slipknot and Linkin Park are big with zoomers. Those four bands alone are essentially half of what a friend of mine listens to.

Linkin Park are by *far* my favourite of those, but they're also the band whose appeal found it easiest to persevere.

The idea of jocks and cool kids listening to nu-metal, embracing the culture and the fashion, is just so alien to me, yet it clearly was something that happened elsewhere, and so gives this stuff a very different interpretation.

When Brad talks about this stuff speaking to them as a queer teenager, from a place of familiarity with the music itself way deeper than my own social contextual interaction with it, I do believe how important and how powerful it is it to them, and yet I still simultaneously have a kneejerk Not For Me reaction to it based on how it was used against me in the contexts of communities and tribalism.

I think it's very right for everyone to push back on the idea that a genre is bad because of the perceived demographic of its listeners - it's never the artists fault if they become popular or misunderstood in culture. I'm guilty of doing this in this thread. But equally I think it's disingenuous to pretend that we form opinions and tastes based on sonics alone.

I hear a Wes Borland riff and I'm 14 again, unsure if the people at this party are safe to tell I'm gay in the hope they have a pal they'll introduce me to, or I'll be hounded out the house for admitting it. I hear a ragtime piano come in over a 4/4 beat, I'm back in a club stuck with some awful bore who pronounces it "Kahn-yee Wehst." I hear the opening arpeggio of "Mr Brightside" and I'm scrambling for a Richmond menthol cigarette to excuse myself out of this dismal indie disco so I can go to the smoking area for some respite.

I think Cobain would have been horrified by what the grunge continuum evolved into

TBF, it seems like Cobain was already somewhat narrow-minded and judgey about music in life... he said G'N'R was "obviously pathetic and untalented" (and "They're really talentless people, and they write crap music, and they’re the most popular rock band on the earth right now. I can’t believe it"). This was after Axl – a big Nirvana fan – offered them an opening spot on a G'N'R/Metallica tour, which Kurt refused.

Even if Kurt didn't like the band's image, or judged them on their popularity or whatever, declaring them "talentless" was pretty dumb.

(And by the way, to tie into the nu-metal discussion – Axl obv also wrote songs about having a terrible childhood, being misunderstood, etc.; he just channeled that energy differently than Kurt, so to speak.)