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\u2026it just makes things easier\u2026\n\n\xa0\n\nIf you study biology, you\u2019ll know about kingdoms, phylum\u2019s, classes, orders, families, geneses, and species\u2026libraries organize books with things like the Dewey decimal system and the universal decimal classification\u2026.and when you go grocery shopping, there are signs directing you to the right aisle or department\u2026\n\n\xa0\n\nThis applies to music, too\u2026we like to organize music into categories called \u201cgenres\u201d\u2026\n\nThis used to be fairly easy\u2026at 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\u2026\n\nMusic has always separated and stratified and evolved, leading to sub-categories\u2026within classical music, for example, we had baroque, chamber music, choral, and so on\u2026.\n\nBut 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\u2026\n\nJazz showed up in the 1910s and soon splintered into a bunch of different sounds\u2026by the 1920s, we were hearing the origins of what eventually became all the flavours of country and western music\u2026the blues records of the 20s and 30s was the forerunner of rhythm and blues\u2026\n\nAnd then when rock\u2019n\u2019roll came along in the 50s, things started simply enough\u2014it was a vaguely defined sound that you knew when you heard it\u2026but the more time went by, the more complicated rock became\u2026genres, sub-genres, sub-sub-genres, sub-sub-sub genres\u2026derivations, offshoots, spin-offs, outgrowths, branches, by-products\u2026\n\nAnd now that we\u2019re all about streaming algorithms\u2014things that require many, many different data points if they\u2019re going to work properly, the number of genres has exploded\u2026people are confused\u2026\n\nThat\u2019s why we\u2019re 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\u2026this is the ongoing history guide to genres\u2026\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices