Should Musical Genres Exist to Define or Defy?
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Imagine you’re behind the wheel and stopped at a red light, frantically scrolling through your Spotify playlists for a song to put on. Your head quickly darts up and down as you scan the intersection, keeping an eye on the traffic lights. “Discover Weekly,” “Indie Mix,” and “Rap Caviar”—none of these playlists seems to fit your mood. After all, you feel worked up and need something fast and upbeat to make this moment livelier. You settle on “Happy Hits,” relying on Spotify’s tastemakers to brighten your day.
This is the purpose genres have always served: classifying music into recognizable categories with similar sounds, archiving the universal feelings and moods within a string of notes, a line of lyrics, a snapshot of time, sonically bound by our shared cultural memory. Record labels conveniently curate a music culture of idolization, while we willingly conform, swarming to a specific aisle of a record shop like a moth to a flame, coddling our favorite artist’s new album. However, how useful are these categories? Why do the conventions of genre confine us? What exactly makes a genre a genre? Theorists have long considered this question, often positing innumerable conclusions that prompt us to question whether genre even exists.
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Genres have become the foundation of our musical experience. Aspects such as chord progression, lyrical content, and instruments are used to classify music. Other signifiers outside musical characteristics include aesthetics, iconography, and cultural imagery, like cowboy hats for country music or “f*** everything” attitudes for punk. What’s less known is that these distinctions are coded by historical injustices.
At the 2020 Grammy Awards, Tyler, the Creator accepted a Grammy for Best Rap Album for his record IGOR, but he later voiced concerns about the categorization of his musical record, stating in a backstage interview, “I’m very grateful that what I made could just be acknowledged in a world like this. But, also, it sucks that whenever we—and I mean guys that look like me—do anything that’s genre-bending, they always put it in a rap or urban category.” He continued, “I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. To me, it’s just a politically correct way to say the n-word. . . Why can’t we just be in pop?” Tyler, the Creator initiated a modern discourse on how the categorization of genres upholds the mainstream culture and perpetuates the marginalization of music that diverges from, subverts, and transcends this culture.
In the past, recording labels heavily prioritized white audiences, often engaging in the practice of selling “race records.” Following the success of “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith, a white performer, labels realized that they could sell the blues to black consumers. A rift emerged between black and white music, which Angela Davis said, “instructed white ears to feel revolted by the blues and, moreover, to assume that this sense of revulsion was instinctive.” If genre classification is supposed to be objective, what does this reveal about its reliability? In other words, is it as definable as we think?
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When Lil Nas X came into the music scene with his groundbreaking hit, “Old Town Road,” he classified it as “country trap.” Despite debuting at number 19 on the Billboard country chart, the song was taken down due to misclassification. Billboard addressed protests, saying they determine genres by “looking at an artist’s chart history, listening to the song, looking at streaming services, and examining how and where the label is promoting and marketing the song.” Justin Bieber had the same issue protesting the nomination of Changes as Best Pop Vocal Album, saying it was an R&B album.
This consistent issue questions the reliability of genres. The existence of ulterior motives at the hands of capitalistic label companies leaves us to wonder if our understanding of genres is correct. Ehren Pflugfelder, a professor of writing at Oregon State University, told the New Yorker, “Genre is always a blending of both formal structure and cultural context . . . This may be the most frustrating thing about genre for those who want it to be stable over time. What makes something country music is often just as much about what the audience for that genre expects it to be.”
Many musicians embraced the artistic liberty of expanding the realms of genre. Selena was one of many who rose to stardom by channeling her individuality and fusing Tejano sound with R&B and pop. What we can learn from this is that genre is ever-changing and constantly transforming. Whether we consider the artist’s intentions or not, human beings have always had a natural inclination to categorize our existence, whether by genre or social order. Hopefully, as we look forward to the next pop stars of our generation, we will embrace the fact that musical categorization is a valuable tool, but the walls of its formation will always bend and rupture for new music conventions.
Strike Out,
Writer: Mishalynn Brown
Editor: Noelle Knowlton
Tallahassee