Musicians, like most artists, hate genre labels. Genres imply limitations and limitations imply restrictions. Artists like to feel they are free of restrictions; that their creativity should be constrained by arbitrary boundaries.
Journalists like genres because it enables them to classify and group artists to distinguish say a rock band from a soul group.
The wider the category the easier it is to make uncontroversial distinctions.
Few are likely to confuse rock music with opera, yet when Pavaroti performed with Elton John, should this be called pop, rock or opera. Is it a mongrel breed that needs another label – rock opera for example . But then that would put it in the same category with The Who’s ‘Tommy’ and ‘Quadrophenia’.
Record shops (ones that still survive!) place albums into sections on the grounds that a customer would otherwise have to sift through all the items to find music that they are looking for.
Even if you go into a store or want to browse online you don’t normally do so in a random way.
If you like Bob Marley you’ll look in the reggae section, if you like Son House you’ll go to The Blues, if you like Rihanna you’ll find her in Pop.
Most music magazines operate within limited genres, like Kerrang for heavy metal or Folk Roots for World Music. The Wire magazine prides itself in being different.
It is an independent magazine produced in London but whose target audience is not confined to the British Isles. It’s strap-line is ‘Adventures In Modern Music’. It was launched in the summer of 1982 and the editorial, by co-founder Anthony Wood, in the first issue sets out their stall:
“The Wire is an attempt to extend the message of the music beyond the initiated …to unravel the mysteries of the music and its musicians for those who look for fundamental answers about the nature of the music and the musicians making it” [Quoted from sleeve notes to The Wire’s20th anniversary audio issue box set] .
Initially the emphasis was on contemporary jazz and improvised sound but gradually this has extended to embrace a wider definition of experimental music to include genres such as electronica and what it calls ‘avant rock’.
Unlike mainstream British titles like Uncut, Q or Mojo there’s a strong possibility that you will not even have heard of the artist featured on the cover. A good indicator of its readership can be gauged from the controversy which followed the decision to run a cover feature on Radiohead in Issue 209 to coincide with the release of Kid A. Many readers protested that although Kid A may have been regarded as an experimental album this did not merit being Wire cover stars.
Similar criticism greeted a Byork cover two months later but in reality, the magazines trademark musings on the “unexpected” in music remained intact.
Their house style is largely humourless and wilfully obtuse. Take this random example from the current (July 2008) issue :
“The way The Pop Group combined incongruous elements resembled dreamwork more than it did any overconscious will to blur boundaries between genres”
This talk of blurring boundaries proves ironic when you check out the reviews section.
In a column designated ‘Avant Rock’ you find a mix of short pieces on drone, noise, acoustic and metal albums from Japan, Australia, Britain and America. The inclusion here of Christina Carter’s ‘Masque Femine’ (which I wrote about on May 4th) is truly bizarre because any record further from the ‘rock’ genre, Avant or otherwise, is hard to imagine.
What point am I making? Well, I suppose that it’s that genre labels are necessary but necessarily flawed.
To claim that genres are unimportant, that there’s just good music and bad music, is a nice idea but is not particularly useful when someone asks you casually ‘So what kind of music do you like?’
‘Anything good’ is a pretty lame response and a check list of favourite bands and singers is a bit juvenile.
My reply would be ‘avant-psych-drone-experiental-folk-blues’ which might just be a tad confusing.
