Music Banter - View Single Post - Are Punk Sub-Genres Needed?

Seltzer · 10-20-2009, 07:29 PM

Reminds me of an analogy I posted on another forum a year or two ago, when someone claimed that any kind of subgenre classification was ridiculous in any situation. Taken out of context it makes me sound like a complete genre whore but whatever.

Quote:

When you first go to school, what you learn can be subdivided into areas like maths, English, social studies, science, art/music and PE. Somewhere in high school, social studies will split off into geography and history, science will split off into chemistry, physics and biology, maths will split off into calculus and statistics etc. and some new subjects will be introduced which mix fields (i.e. management, economics etc.). At this point, going into much more detail isn't too meaningful to high school students.

Then you go to university and end up doing a whole paper on electromagnetism etc. in your first year and it becomes more and more specialised over time. By the time you're a postgrad, you'll end up doing research and ploughing through 1000 pg books on incredibly specific topics like how the use of trapezoidal clocks gives rise to adiabatic circuits.

My point is that something so specific sounds absolutely ridiculous to us and is meaningless to 99% of people. But to people who are interested in these things, it is possible to spend 20 years studying them and to write tomes about them.

Same with music. 'Funeral doom metal' isn't going to mean too much to the general population... but to people who like and listen to a fair bit of doom metal, the distinction is blatantly obvious. Some people in their lifetimes will never musically discern beyond classic rock, alternative, 'that screaming music', classical, jazz, hip-hop, pop and 'slow jamz'. Well that's their choice... but it does look incredibly foolish when they criticise people for using more specific labels.