A Guide to Genres: Part 1

Humans have always tried to make sense the world by putting things into neat little piles and filing them away somehow for further reference…it just makes things easier…

If you study biology, you’ll know about kingdoms, phylum’s, classes, orders, families, geneses, and species…libraries organize books with things like the Dewey decimal system and the universal decimal classification….and when you go grocery shopping, there are signs directing you to the right aisle or department…

This applies to music, too…we like to organize music into categories called “genres”…

This used to be fairly easy…at the turn of the 20th century, we basically had popular songs of the day (vaudeville, show tunes and the like), folk and traditional music, religious music, and material from classical composers…

Music has always separated and stratified and evolved, leading to sub-categories…within classical music, for example, we had baroque, chamber music, choral, and so on….

But as the population changed and as the recorded music industry began to take hold and more people began to buy records, music this fragmentation began to speed up…

Jazz showed up in the 1910s and soon splintered into a bunch of different sounds…by the 1920s, we were hearing the origins of what eventually became all the flavours of country and western music…the blues records of the 20s and 30s was the forerunner of rhythm and blues…

And then when rock’n’roll came along in the 50s, things started simply enough—it was a vaguely defined sound that you knew when you heard it…but the more time went by, the more complicated rock became…genres, sub-genres, sub-sub-genres, sub-sub-sub genres…derivations, offshoots, spin-offs, outgrowths, branches, by-products…

And now that we’re all about streaming algorithms—things that require many, many different data points if they’re going to work properly, the number of genres has exploded…people are confused…

That’s why we’re going to do this: strip back all the terms used to describe rock in order to understand the natural order of things when it comes to organizing things…this is the ongoing history guide to genres…

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