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

"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.

fuck the police

"Sting" is a maligned genre

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

― flamenco drop (BradNelson)

holy shit you're right, not just knee-high striped socks but knee-high striped socks WITH GARTERS

i mean probably they just hadn't invented sock glue in '93

never really listened to korn or any other nu-metal, listening to them now i really like the bass player's tone. a lot of the reasons i listened to the stuff i did was generational signifiers... part of my "i just wasn't made for these times" schtick was that i only listened to boomer music. like i was deeply distrustful of nirvana when they were around, i went that far with it. fucking stockholm syndrome, clearly, but it's too late for me now, i'm stuck with all these damn mike oldfield records

pussy fag solidarity btw!

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

― flamenco drop (BradNelson)

i think this is a good point, honestly i really feel like so much of queer culture is just being super fucking traumatized. so for instance led zeppelin is resolutely _not_ queer culture but pink floyd circa _the wall_ absolutely is - "comfortably numb" is maybe the best queer song by a completely straight asshole i know.

it's too late for me now, i'm stuck with all these damn mike oldfield records

lol, at least those are all fun iirc, after my early 80's high school era I ended up with like six Iron Butterfly records (four too many)

oh yeah the problem isn't that i have mike oldfield records it's that half of the music i listen to is still from the '70s. being stuck in the past is bad enough as it is, being stuck in the _1970s_ of all things is a special kind of hell

big brown beastie big brown face, I'd rather be with you than flying through space

I wondered about that, especially in the UK.

Country & Western was huge in Scotland up until the 90s. It was a bit of an oldies as in over 30s thing (right up to great granny age) but basically anyone born before 1985 grew up with cowboy films on TV.

We also had to put up with shit like this tv show 'Thingummyjig' primetime on a friday in the late 70s and throughout the 80s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HpNaY1G5tI

Yeah my dad's Scottish and I think country / cowboy movies was a bit of a big thing in his childhood

I don’t even believe electro swing is a real thing

It's real and it's coming for you

It’s the worst. I’d guess the US equivalent of the largely ex public school, slumming it all summer on the festival circuit electro-swing types is the tech bro / VC types that have supposedly infiltrated Burning Man?

Country & Western was huge in Scotland up until the 90s.

Same in Ireland too I believe. I mean, when you think about it, it makes sense given the origins of country music. There's a lot of (or there used to be a lot of) homegrown Irish and Scottish country artists, which definitely does not seem to be a thing in England.

The TV show Hamish MacBeth used to use bluegrass music.

still big particularly on the west coast of scotland. glasgow even has it's own grand ole opry - http://www.glasgowsgrandoleopry.co.uk/

I finally got around to skimming through an electro swing mix, and it is indeed extremely corny music. It's hard for me to imagine that it's gone far beyond fad status but maybe there are tons of electro swing true believers.

this lot seem quite popular - https://www.caravanpalace.com

they will of course one day end up in the hague, on trial for crimes against music.

Country was an important thing in Wales as well. And as far as I can tell a lot of the English North.

Country was virtually non-existent in Brookline, Massachusetts, as far as I can remember.

We had tons of country in Colorado, but in high school in particular there was a huge "us vs. them" divide between those who loved country (and emulated or aped the cowboy look) and those who did not.

my second ever big concert was a garth brooks / martina mcbride arena show. i was 12. it was very entertaining.

(this was reno nv and most of the radio stations in town were country, so it was everywhere)

We used to call 'em shit-kickers.