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

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.)

xp

Yup, yup. These experiences are all valid and all subjective to a degree.

I have a kneejerk distaste for almost all popular music c1999/2000 because I associate it with very terrible student nightclubs and parties that I sort-of had to attend in order to make friends but also really didn't enjoy. Nu-metal was included in all that, but so was Ibiza trance and pop-garage like Artful Dodger and Moby's Play and the Stereophonics and, well, pretty much anything from that era - it just makes me think of bad times, feeling outside of things, and also my parents splitting up (which didn't help).

"obviously pathetic and untalented" - i like (read: have a really complicated relationship with the music of) gnr but i think everything cobain said about them is the funniest thing that's ever been said lmao

i graduated high school in 1999. all my friends were skaters into korn and wu-tang. i made fun of them for liking limp bizkit. they made fun of me for liking aaliyah. we were all stupid, but we got along. there were of course asshole cliques around and they all liked pretty much the same stuff, i.e. whatever was popular.

i guess my point is that my distaste for things has never been based on that "my enemy's friend is my enemy" philosophy. i've just always thought numetal was awful. (shrug)

+xpost to brad's point re:androgyny/queerness in early numetal- i brought up something semi-relevant on the nirvana topic a while back; to recap-- in college i took a history of rock music class. one of the longstanding themes in the text book was men in rock challenging gender identity. bowie was championed heavily. when we got to nirvana, it mentioned that kc would sometimes wear dresses and of course even covered bowie. in class discussion on "androgynous rockers" (literally the phrase used in the textbook lol) more than one (male) classmate not only had a hard time pronouncing the word "androgynous", choosing instead to simply call it "gay", but also went out of their way to make sure that everyone knew they definitely preferred nirvana's cover over bowie's original. i never took their casual (and misdirected) homophobia as representative of all grunge fans, but i did have to chuckle at just how far all of it flew right over their heads. i'm not sharing this anecdote as "proof" that certain fans are of a certain mind, just kind of a funny aside. maybe it wasn't that common and a lot of nirvana fans did get it; i didn't like the music anyway, so i didn't have much invested. i certainly noticed a lot of the more fringe content when my friends would play the first korn album, but i didn't think much of it because, again, i didn't care for the music. i never questioned them on it because i just figured they liked louder, more aggro music and that was what was popular at the time. whether they were gay/questioning didn't make any difference to me because they were cool friends either way.

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.

this is me!

The idea of listening to a brace of bro country with its relentless references to boots / pickup trucks / guns / farm equipment / good ‘old boys etc is like musical kryptonite, I’d rather go deaf. I can’t relate to it at all as a Brit and don’t care to, the whole thing is so US specific - from the drawling ‘country’ vocals to the pedal steel and all. I feel like I have no reference point for it all.

However listening to a brace of golden era gangsta rap with its relentless references to chains / driveby’s / guns / drug smuggling / gangs is some of my favourite music. I just as equally can’t relate to it at all, again, the whole thing is so US specific. Yet I’ll go back to it again and again. Guess I’m a sucker for a decent sample and an 808.

But equally I think it's disingenuous to pretend that we form opinions and tastes based on sonics alone.

i agree with this, and i think you can even argue that the audience of a scene can change the identity of that scene, especially in terms of how it's viewed historically, it's just that whenever i zoom in the picture gets so much more complicated. ostensibly untroubled and popular teens in my middle school wore slipknot shirts and i guess it feels weird to argue whether the music was "for" them or not when it obviously tapped into a lot of subconscious cultural currents we were all experiencing in the late '90s. maybe it's that i think that focusing on the tribalism that inevitably emerges often obscures the art at the center in favor of reiterating high school social dynamics

xp Yup, in many ways country and gangsta rap are as "exotic" or as removed from my immediate world as, say, amapiano or cumbia

I'd like to see a graph of gun references in Bro Country songs vs. Gangsta rap songs

you can form opinions and tastes on whatever basis you want! you’re a thinking subject, not a helpless vessel into which the world pours phenomena and qualia

more crucially you can choose which opinions you want to reflect on critically and which ones (if any!) you want to build lazy biases around

i mean, if we're judging the quality of certain music based on the fans of that style, i had way more run ins with completely insufferable techno djs/edm fans in the late 90s/early 2000s than any other style. i worked in a dj shop for a while though, that definitely soured me on the local scene.

insufferable techno fans? incredibly hard to believe, are you sure you weren't hallucinating on party drugs

Always fascinated when people don't like certain genres because they can't relate to them. It's totally valid, so this isn't a knock. There are genres I listen to entirely for my ability to relate to them, but I feel like I try and seek out and listen to genres I don't immediately relate to, entirely because I want to experience that with which I don't relate if that makes sense.

xpost tlg-
i'm sure i wasn't without my own snobbery as i was deep into my independent/backpacker hiphop/turntablism phase, but yeah--- some of those folks got tresspassed from the shop where i worked (by the owners no less!) basically for being obnoxious cunts.

maybe if they were more pleasant i wouldn't have considered their music absolute trash?

i think it’s weird that on a board 1) with so much professed anti capitalism

That well known anti-capitalism of pop music...

well, we don't want to pay for it

It's makers do.

also xpost to myself-
they were much more rare, but all the d'n'b heads about town that shopped at the store were cool af. one of them eventually became a coworker and that's where i first started to get an interest in that stuff, based on a killer mixtape he made for me (no tracklist, of course lol).

You could probably have prepackaged Pop music without capitalism. There was certainly plenty of it about in the Eastern Bloc during Soviet times, though of course many would argue those societies were also capitalist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Ix0k2JD90

anyway I've spent more energy and thought on this today than I probably should, someone start a poll where we can fight over which is best out of disco, UK garage, 80s r&b, shoegaze and Motown

I think it's disingenuous to pretend that we form opinions and tastes based on sonics alone.

I feel like, if we make a concerted effort, we can get back to the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of hating music for its own sake.

i agree with this, and i think you can even argue that the audience of a scene can change the identity of that scene, especially in terms of how it's viewed historically, it's just that whenever i zoom in the picture gets so much more complicated. ostensibly untroubled and popular teens in my middle school wore slipknot shirts and i guess it feels weird to argue whether the music was "for" them or not when it obviously tapped into a lot of subconscious cultural currents we were all experiencing in the late '90s. maybe it's that i think that focusing on the tribalism that inevitably emerges often obscures the art at the center in favor of reiterating high school social dynamics

thanks for that post, Brad. my reaction to this thread and the other thread was to shut down. i needed it.

important context for the nu-metal fanbase sociology stuff - 2002 discussion about moshers vs scallies:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/chillin/chill/052002/28/mosh4.shtml

average nu-metal fan that I knew growing up was basically a British version of this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdYFhRhvU1w

many xps but to Daniel - I have seen precisely that attitude expressed re country. Loretta Lynn and Big & Rich are the same thing and it's all bad. Mind-boggling but it is an attitude that is out there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/13hjjfo/country_is_the_worst_music_genre_ever_and_you/

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....

― Do I look like I know what a jpeg is? (dog latin), Tuesday, May 23, 2023 10:01 AM (three hours ago)

I wondered about that, especially in the UK. A hilarious moment in the YesYears doc from '92 features Bill Bruford referring to the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood movie theme song orchestration in "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed" as Yes diving headfirst into "country music - BIG COUNTRY!"

Did you know that the recording

opens with an orchestral theme taken from the soundtrack to the 1958 Western film The Big Country by Jerome Moross.

someone start a poll where we can fight over which is best out of disco, UK garage, 80s r&b, shoegaze and Motown

Motown hands down

Did you know that the recording

opens with an orchestral theme taken from the soundtrack to the 1958 Western film The Big Country by Jerome Moross.

― Halfway there but for you, Tuesday, May 23, 2023 1:44 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago)

That is wild - I was completely unaware. Ol' Bill was right!

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

― but also fuck you (unperson)

it really was

i don't know what the jocks listened to at my school (north jersey, super-gentrified republican suburb in morris county). i didn't actually talk to anybody but other nerds. i know the people who bullied me were into jane's addiction but they weren't jocks, they were weirdos and outcasts too. all i know is that in high school i listened to led zeppelin and exclusively led zeppelin, and i dressed exclusively in led zeppelin t-shirts, which were ratty and had holes in them because led zeppelin t-shirts were expensive. my project throughout high school was getting tape dubs of all the led zeppelin albums. this was a major project because i didn't talk to any other kids except for my one friend who... yeah i'm not gonna say anything more about _him_ except that he didn't have any zep albums. he liked the police. i think.