I hate genres!

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Everytime time that people have a conversation about music in real life or on the internet the word "genre" comes up.
I realize the word genre is used to categorize music. The basic genres like rock or folk aren't that bad but those sub-genres are the killers.
There are so many idiotic stub-genres like math-core,screamo,death-core and acid-trance.

Most of the music that I like does not fit into just one genre . it fits into more than one genre or an unknown genre.
The sub-genres are pretty much useless for me.

I wish it could just be called music and not have to fit into a specific genre. Genre is also a good way for other people to judge your music without listening to it at all.
We should not hate something just because it is mainstream pop or matal or electronic.
We should just listen to music and if we like it then we like it.

I rather listen to music without worrying about genres. Genres are useless to me.
Listening to music is a very emotional experience and I think that music is the most important form of art. The music media comes up with these crap labels and I find it insulting to people that actually care about music.

Last edited by artrat on 25 Dec 2011, 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I know exactly where you're coming from. Trying to describe music using words is pretty much impossible, and always will be unless humans evolve to develop synesthesia or something (how cool would that be?). The trouble is, genre definitions are a useful part of describing music, but yeah...they are often over- and mis-used.

Math rock is interesting because it mainly refers to non-4/4 time signatures, but contemporary music has dabbled in that for decades...take jazz drummers, for instance! My personal beef is with the genre of 'post rock', which is one genre label that led me to a lot of bands I enjoy today. On principal I understand what it means and why it's used, but ironically when members of post rock bands are interviewed, they often say they hate the term or don't consider themselves to be a part of it. Mogwai for instance are punk in ethic, even though they don't 'sound' punk; God is an Astronaut consider themselves to be prog or space rock; Mono are orchestral rock that owes as much to Goreki and Beethoven as it does to Sonic Youth and Led Zep.

On one hand it's useful but it's also limiting, especially to the artists themselves. A descriptive term or useful label gradually becomes a pigeonhole or confining box. I blame the music press more than anything - they're often the hunt for the next big story, while the artists and their fans just want to enjoy the music for what it is.

I listen to so many different types of music, I like genres because it helps me organize music. Usually how I feel kinda determines the type of music I want to hear if there where no genres I would have no way of finding the specific type of music I want to hear. I agree that the sub-genres can get a bit ridiculous though I think it can be fun to try and figure out what specific sub-genre a band is in.

But yeah obviously psychedelic rock and black metal are very different.......well kinda, actually there is psychedelic black metal. When it comes to metal the subgenres are pretty nessisary though because there are so many different kinds of metal. But anyways the catagories make it so i can pick a type of music and listen to it.

I feel the same about so-called "post rock". I like stuff like Slint, Mogwai, GY!BE, A Silver Mount Zion, but "post rock" isn't a very good genre description. Ambient rock would be a more telling description.

There are times when I might like to participate in a discussion of Electronic music, but its an odd category to define. I mean I like Daft Punk but is that electronic or rock? Or kind of a mix?

On the other hand someone might just insist that isn't "real" electronic music and they only play Trance or something.

I think there's nothing wrong with noticing that certain bands are related in 'spirit'. To me a genre is a family of music that is similar in some kind of sense you can't exactly/always pin down.

I only dislike genres when they are used as labels/pejoratives to bring a song/artist down. But I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and just pretend there is no such thing as a genre (musical style).

One thing I do hate is hair-splitting with genres (ie that's not post-hardcore, that's emotivecore!) I mean to me, all that core stuff is just emo or whatever. Same with electronic genre splitting. To me it's all techno.

I agree. Genres are very useful when classifying and discussing music.

Genre discrimination seems to be very common. There was recently a forum post where someone claimed to hate electronic music. I somehow doubt that person has heard every single electronic song ever written. I just wish that people would not judge an entire genre based on the few songs that they have heard.
I once thought that I hated hip hop until I heard some very brilliant music of that genre. If people would be open minded of all genres we would have less discrimination.

When I listen to music I don't really notice the genre unless I purposely think about it. I don't listen to a song because it fits under a certain genre.
There is some music that I hate and some music that I love. Genre is irrelevant.

[img][800:768]http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/3400000/The-Killers-the-killers-3418935-1024-768.jpg[/img]
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That's very funny!

But then electronic is an extremely broad genre, what he said is similar to claiming to hate any song that involves a guitar, which is a rather foolish thing to say. I don't see the problem with discriminating against a specific sub-genre in which there is little room for variation, such as deathcore.

Yeah, I personally can't fathom how anyone could enjoy screamo. Though then again, I did like this screamo version of 'Fireflies' I heard. So I guess every genre has the capacity to include good music.

I pretty much exclusively listen to Synthpop and electronica now, but there's still other genres I enjoy sometimes. I love 'In Dreams' by Roy Orbison for example.

Ta.

Like with everything in life, people aren't content if something isn't labelled or stereotyped.

If something cannot be categorized, someone out there will find a word to categorize it in.

God forbid for letting it go, and just calling it music!

I hate the arguments more so than the categorizing itself. In the music I listen to the most there's like three decent bands per genre and that's really weird ;P. I'll look em' up on youtube and everyone's talking about each other's mothers because they aren't up to date on the new 20 genres for the same band that were created last month. I wouldn't mind if the categorizing were more broad, like if The Dillinger Escape Plan and Underoath were under the same genre it wouldn't bother me a bit.