on genre
In eartifacts articles, the concept of musical genre is occasionally used, sometimes to organize artifacts and sometimes as a convenient way to make certain comments. Naturally, genre is a slippery concept at best; it is taken as given that only broad generalizations can be made, and therefore any attempt to precisely define genre(s) is guaranteed to fail. The use of genre is predicated entirely on how useful it is in very particular situations, that is, it is considered to be completely non-normative. This article attempts to clarify how the genre concept is used by eartifacts.
relevant characteristics
When the genre concept is used by eartifacts, the concrete (that is, more-or-less well-defined rather than totally subjective) aspects of the music itself, as heard by a listener, are considered relevant. Little attention is paid to the “scene” that a piece of music comes from, and to related works by the same artist or related artists. In addition, no attention is paid to textual content (even within the music itself, i.e. lyrics) like titles, band names, album names, &c. Little attention is paid to the era that a piece of music comes from; a piece of music that comes out a decade after a scene dies that sounds like it was from that scene will likely get some of the same genre labels.
Largely subjective dimensions of music like e.g. “intelligence”, “sadness”, “abrasion”, &c. are not considered relevant. Rather, the actual musical/sonic qualities (instrumentation, tonal content, vocal delivery, loudness, tempo, &c.) are considered relevant instead, and should be enough that subjective dimensions mostly act as proxies for combinations of sonic ones.
how genre terms are used
eartifacts tries to stay limited to conventional (i.e. often used) genre terms.
organization
eartifacts’s artifacts are taxonomized based on assigning a list of one or more genres to each artifact. This is for the purpose of organization and ease of use, because it allows readers to get a vague sense of what kind of music is represented by a particular artifact, and allows browsing by genre: see here for all genres represented by eartifacts.
commentary
Sometimes genres are useful when making a comment on a piece of music, to say that an element of the music is typical (or atypical) for its style, or is possibly borrowed from “somewhere else”.
clarifications on particular genre terminology
“pop”
The term “pop” is not used on its own as a genre term by eartifacts. This term generally refers to either of two things:
- Popular music in general, in which case it is redundant because eartifacts only examines popular music.
- “Radio-friendly/top-40 music”, in which case it is too vague and covers too many separate genres to be worth anything.
“emo” & “screamo”
eartifacts does not use the term “emo”, as the term refers to too many separate genres to be worth anything (likewise with “screamo”). Instead, some terms that are used by eartifacts that are sometimes referred to as “emo” are listed below:
| term | Wikipedia | as historically defined by |
|---|---|---|
| skramz | screamo | Heroin, Antioch Arrow, Portraits Of Past, Saetia, Orchid, Jeromes Dream, pg.99 |
| midwest emo | midwest emo | Cap'n Jazz, Sunny Day Real Estate, Braid, American Football, TTNG |
| pop-punk | pop punk | Sunny Day Real Estate, Jimmy Eat World, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy |
It’s not worth listing genres that are used by eartifacts that are sometimes referred to as “screamo”, since this would include any genre that makes use of screamed vocals at least somewhat frequently.
post-hardcore & post-punk
The terms “post-hardcore” and “post-punk” are used by eartifacts as super-genres.
In particular, post-hardcore is used to broadly mean “hardcore punk derivatives that are not almost entirely defined by hardcore punk, all of which come historically after the first wave of hardcore punk”. The mention of era here is not actually that relevant except that it emphasizes that post-hardcore music is the kind of music that could only have arrived after the first wave of hardcore punk. As a strict broadening of hardcore punk, it is exclusive with “hardcore” proper, and is also not restricted to just that music that is said to have the “post-hardcore” sound as exemplified by bands like At the Drive-In and Saosin.
The term “post-punk” is used analogously to “post-hardcore” (and is thus exclusive with punk) by eartifacts.
hip-hop & “rap”
The term “hip-hop” is often taken to mean that the music has an emphasis on rapped vocals. However, there exists plenty of hip-hop that does not have an emphasis on vocals at all or may be entirely instrumental. For this reason, hip-hop that does have an emphasis on rapped vocals is labeled as hip-hop by eartifacts, and instrumental (or nearly instrumental) hip-hop is labeled as both hip-hop and instrumental hip-hop by eartifacts.
The term “rap” is not used as a genre term by eartifacts because having a distinguishing term for “hip-hop-with-rapped-vocals” is not useful in this context.
“IDM” & “electronica”
The term “IDM” (short for “intelligent dance music”) is not used by eartifacts. The term does not identify anything beyond a very vague sense of the instrumentation (one may as well just use the term “electronic” instead), and is also a loaded term that relies on the music being perceived as “intelligent” to qualify, rather than relying on musical/sonic properties.
The term “electronica” is also not used, for the similar reason that the term “electronic” is used instead.