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

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.

goat ropers.

what they do!

in Indiana the punk-hating rednecks were called "grits"

Couple things I've thought about since starting this thread:

1. Often when people think of a genre they're not especially familiar or fond of, they'll think of an imaginary low common denominator within that style. So if I tell a friend I like "indie music", they'll imagine some sort of midway point between Oasis and the Kooks - a muddy, mid-tempo dirge of guitars played by po-faced white boys singing variably cheery or dreary songs about the weather - they won't think of Big Thief or Parquet Courts or Golden Teacher etc.
When I tell another friend I like techno, they'll either imagine some faceless DJ playing an endlessly repetitive booming noise, or think of something that isn't techno at all, say "Encore Une Fois" by Sash!
When I say I like Country, they might think of linedancing music or some mid-80s AOR country rock or "That Don't Impress Me Much" by Shania Twain.

2. There are styles out there where artistry is ulterior to the general fun and theatre of the thing. Think about the endless Donk nights that are springing up all over the place. DJs with joke names like Dairylea Donkers, Count Donkula, Oxford English Donktionary (I made that last one up).
These are enormously popular with people who just want to dress in garish clothes and listen to daft, fast music. You're there to have fun and bounce around to nightcore and hard house versions of pop songs. It's not meant to be taken seriously.
And I think that's more-or-less the idea with things like Electro-Swing - it serves more as a "functional" soundtrack, possibly for people who aren't really serious music fans but just enjoy costume dress-up and play-acting. Again, it's hard for me to imagine someone being really deeply into electro-swing, but maybe they are?

i don't know, some of the most interesting and creative music ever made has been "functional" or "workmanlike", and artistes with lofty airs make dreary shit all the time. i don't think this is a useful distinction in the way you're applying it.

Yeah, but it's not functional in the same way as, say early Chicago footwork. It really is the soundtrack for people who probably don't care about the music to get dolled up and go for a campy night out to. Whether it's good or interesting or not is beside the point - I'm not defending it

they won't think of Big Thief or Parquet Courts or Golden Teacher etc.

i guess it comes down to what is indie? but to me there is literally zero indie-ness to someone like Golden Teacher. in fact i'd describe them as in opposition to indie

okay, Golden Teacher is strongly pushing it

I was trying to think of a British indie band I like from recent years and coming up thumbs

sorry to be so pedantic. i do get the point you were making though.

As someone whose musical taste was heavily influenced by my two older sisters and their milieu of friends, when I witnessed music snobbery, it was nearly always from fellow dudes my age who would dismiss any genre that had too high a % of women fans. Hell, it would even serve as justification for hating songs by bands they otherwise liked.

As mentioned in this thread, a similar snobbery was closely echoed towards genres/artists who appealed to too many redneck-leaning bro-types. However, the dude-heavy music consensus, in my eyes anyway, seemed more dismissive towards the preferences of women than those of the bros - it was a convenient method for seemingly "progressive" guys to launder their misogyny and homophobia via pop culture preferences. It's great that such attitudes are now viewed as antiquated and outre, however I fear that we men we'll just find more gamergates and other areas of society to express those toxic, retrograde ideas.

Yeah, there are a lot of hard/soft divides in genres that tend to end up with music women prefer being dismissed by male fans—hair metal vs. thrash, crossover rap vs. boom bap, countrypolitan vs. honky tonk, etc.

...which always struck me as really odd when I was young, because (as a straight dude) I vastly much rather go to a show that had women at it than a sausagefest.

Bands that take a popularizing turn at some point in their careers (Genesis being the ur-example) have been known to reflect on this. "Dude, there are GIRLS in the audience! Awesome!"

That's a verbatim Tony Banks quote!

Indeed. Recently on Reddit there was a goofy fantasy thread about whether you'd rather have been in Rush or Led Zeppelin, and someone (not me) said "Zeppelin, because they had girls at their shows."

i'd rather be in rush and not be haunted by the things i did in zeppelin

Ums: Well, yeah, I completely agree that aesthetically unforgivable shit is preferable to ethically unforgivable shit. Just trying to address the immediate topic at hand.

Fortunately none of us has to actually choose. We can carry on with our lives and strive to be better.

Returning to the Nu-metal and popularity discussion upthread:

It was the popular skater boys in middle school who were into Korn, Limp Bizkit, etc. I was deeply into punk, hardcore, and crusty stuff, and they just couldn’t understand why I didn’t like the bands that they liked. What it seemed like then, and which I have more tolerance for now, is that the pain and anger expressed by Davis and etc seemed canned to me, it felt like pre-packaged rebellion (akin the Warped Tour stuff, which I also mostly hated), and I just couldn’t get over how falsely it rang. The angst of Submission Hold or Capitalist Casualties was more my thing, I guess.

Now, I don’t mind a lot of nu-metal, but don’t really listen to it at all outside of when the Zoomers play it at their after-school shifts at the climbing gym where I go.

I should also say that an older friend— a former ilxor whose dn on here was “eppy” back in the day— was the one who turned me away from crust and hardcore. He made me a tape in 1999 that just changed everything, so cheers to that.

Also, I should say, they also didn’t understand why I didn’t like nu-metal because I was actually clearly a fag, whereas they were just wearing lipstick and nail polish to freak out their parents and the jocks. Unlike this latter population tho, they didn’t call me a fag, and were actually nice to me.

the only kid in my high school class who i'm aware was into Slipknot (though not nu-metal more broadly) was kinda pocket-protector nerdy, he played me "It's not unusual" on laserdisc or something the one time i went to his house. might have been his dad's Tom Jones collection, idk. he was mostly into showing off the tech.

all the nu-metal fans i knew growing up lived in the burbs, otherwise they were not a monolith. the ones who skateboarded were more likely to be into 3rd wave punk i guess (can't recall a city kid who was into that stuff either). the person i know who was most deeply into nu-metal was a much younger kid who my buddy in LI used to babysit, and is now the drummer is his HC band, so there ya go.

10 years ago i ran into an "ostensibly untroubled and popular" girl from my hs at a coffee shop and we exchanged info, which led to her emailing me about how painful her experience of high school had been. some of it was relatable to me, but she also felt a lot of social pressures that i was oblivious to or untroubled by. sorry to go all breakfast club on you, ilx. but i came away from that exchange feeling like, as hellish as hs had been, a lot of kids who i'd perceived as coasting had it much worse.

i think Slipknot had a lot to offer the tech geek kid in my hs- outwardly, a way to sidestep an identity he felt uneasy with, and to endorse more violent expressions of rage than he might have been uncomfortable making overtly. inwardly, i have no doubt that the hostility and angst was relatable to him.

Obvs Fred Again being the grandson of the former owner of the Daily Mail tips the scales for whatever scene he falls in but I’m more referring the the wealth disparity of the fan base ;)

― Agnes, Agatha, Germaine and Jack (Willl), Friday, May 19, 2023 6:39 AM (five months ago)

Fred Again is great name for the Nu Metal revival. Congrats.

― INDEPENDENTS DAY BY STEVEN SPILBERG (President Keyes), Friday, May 19, 2023 7:23 AM (five months ago)