A Humble Addendum

First, Tom Ewing’s in-progress formulation on how we understand and use music genres, followed by a minor corollary from yours truly:

Imagine you find a record you like in a genre you don’t usually listen to very deeply. Here are two broad ways you might talk about it publically:

“I don’t listen to much [genre] but I really like [artist].”

“[Artist] transcends [genre] and exposes its limitations.”

These positions are what I’m calling weak and strong exceptionalism – the adjectives not meant as value judgements, incidentally. In weak exceptionalism, the qualities of the artist are measured against the relative yardstick of the listener’s experience of the genre, which is admitted to be low. In strong exceptionalism, the qualities of the artist are measured against the typical qualities of the genre.

Tom is incisive as usual, but there’s something in his idea that assumes too much, maybe, that genres are out there (something only “to be experienced”), and we work with them as yardsticks to evaluate the relative quality/effectiveness/progressiveness of a particular artist.

This is not to say that Tom’s not right, or that we don’t do things like this as music listeners/fans/critics, of course.  I wouldn’t be responding to this post if it weren’t worthwhile enough to do so.  What I’d add to it is the idea that when we make these rationalizations, we’re not doing so against some objective set of boundaries, but we’re helping to actually make those boundaries ourselves.

Genre lines are as fluid as the subjectivities of individual listeners–they have to be, if we want to give listeners the agency to make meaning from music other than what the artists or labels or radio stations want–and so when we utter some sort of comparison, we’re by default laying them down for ourselves (and perhaps others), no matter how fleetingly. When we say, in Tom’s parlance, “I don’t listen to much [genre]“, we’re also defining our idea of what’s in and out of that particular category, which is not something we’re always going to share with everyone else (particularly in scenes or cultures with endlessly proliferating micro-genres).

Of course, there are those–critics, especially, but also record store owners, labels, playlist organizers for radio stations/Pandora, etc–whose opinions are weighted more than others.  Which, in the case of Pitchfork, say, can lead to a sense of resentment within particular quarters, because it’s seen as having far too much sway in this particular contest.  Tom’s always been one to say that categorization is part of the joy of music fandom, and I very much agree with this.  It’s just that I’d like to add that part of this joy as well is making up, or at least helping to shape the categories as we go.

One might even say that genres are performative in this way: when we categorize, we inevitably create.

Filed under: genre  performative  Tom Ewing