clutnuckle

I honestly don't know how to tackle a response like this. Coltrane was most definitely not the final stepping stone of jazz; yes, he brought it to unbelievable heights of spirituality, but even after his death, Miles Davis helped branched jazz out further. Free Improv artists started taking their jazz undertones and putting them up for display. Avant-garde jazz artists continued to expand their horizons, rivaling modern-classical composers for complexity of arrangements.

As Conan said, jazz-punk, nu-jazz... All of them are recent deviations from the regular jazz sound into something new. Innovation did not halt on Coltrane's death.

Grindcore and black metal are essentially meldings of standard metal and other genres - they're not distinctively metal. A LOT of grindcore sounds like a rational altercation between metal and hardcore punk/powerviolence. In that case, punk is JUST as innovative as metal, because it too has branched into something different.

You're being awfully difficult, aren't you? This just isn't true; while punk as a 'lifestyle' has become a complete joke (**** bands like Choking Victim, Leftover Crack, Star ****ing Hipsters, absolute disgraces to the term 'punk'), several of the famed punk artists of the 80s still release music; in fact, in their old age they tend to be more inventive, experimenting with wider arrangements of people, paving the way for new expression. Their anger most certainly has not died. Much like any other genre, it's become stagnated due to an overwhelming increase in terrible copycat bands, but that happens in EVERY genre, even metal.

How can folk music not be distinct? It IS the most distinct genre ever, if anything, as its sole purpose is to be the music of the people. Yes, each culture/subculture will have its own flares that they put into their folk traditions, but the sounds overlap so often, it's not even funny. Much of the Western folk I've heard borrows greatly from Eastern folk, especially in the southern countries (at least from personal experience).

In folk, you have people ALL over the world, taking what is generally the same idea and injecting their own thoughts into them. Obviously there are exceptions (any folk from Africa that I've heard is far more angular), but the general consensus from my hearings is that there is a very obvious similarity.

In contrast, I've heard power metal from 10-15 different countries. Virtually no change in structure or approach exists; the notes are different, but there is virtually no originality injected into said craft. So what if tomorrow a Nigerian power metal band is created? If they don't offer anything original to the genre, then it's not even worth mentioning that they're there.

You seem to have that kind of concern:

Who cares if people in two different countries do it if they don't do anything different from one another. Maybe that means metal is everywhere, but it doesn't mean that it's a 'bottomless pit', because being a bottomless pit requires constant reinvention. Not just copycatting.