By Andrea Miller
“Obscuro” may sound like a magician’s moniker, “C-86” like the latest city bylaw and “Emo” the name of a small township outside of Thunder Bay.
Not quite. These are music genres, specifically sub-genres under the umbrella term rock ‘n’ roll, and if you’ve never heard of them, you’re not alone.
It seems that music genres have proliferated underground with the speed and voracity of reality TV shows, leaving music connoisseurs searching for their genre-to-English dictionary and the rest of the world without a hope of ever catching up.
By its very definition, “Obscuro” is that “musical territory you never dreamed existed,” and gains its notoriety by being difficult to locate, according to online music guide allmusic.com. “C-86” was the name of a cassette distributed by British magazine NME in the mid-1980s featuring the music of Primal Scream and The Bodines, whose simplistic guitar sounds set the precedent for the genre. “Emo,” short for emotional, was an arty evolution of hardcore punk recognized for its introspective, confessional lyrics.
Though “Obscuro” and “C-86” are rarely seen in print outside of specific-interest publications, these styles are just some of the hundreds of sub-genres that break down music styles into tiny digestible bites.
But some say it’s still hard to swallow.
“Some of the bigger chain stores have an “Alternative” section, but what’s alternative? It means different. And they have Pearl Jam in there, who sells millions of records. To me, Frank Sinatra should be alternative – he’s playing different music and sells fewer albums,” says Terry MacKay, manager of Record Runner, an independent music store on Rideau Street.
The 11 different categories Record Runner offers, ranging from punk to jazz to blues, have remained fairly stable and MacKay says he has no plans to break down the mega-genres to accommodate smaller ones.
Although genres can be confusing and most often overlap one another, Mike Scott, manager of Music World in the Rideau Centre, says separating styles can serve a purpose.
“They can be helpful because they give customers a good point to start off from. But [genres] can be detrimental in some ways.
If instead of a rock section you had to say ‘It’s in the neo-punk-post-Sex-Pistols down by the hip hop early ‘80s stuff,’ it divides the music too much and its harder to keep track of.”
Categorizing life into tiny workable units is what we do.
How else can we make sense of the world zipping by us in flashes of colour and buzzing with white noise? So it comes as no surprise that music is divided in a similar fashion. As much as I shudder to think that Weezer and Whitesnake share a section, without a point of reference, I’m at a loss to describe why that grouping clashes.
Music genres sometimes arise out of an artist’s self-imposed tag, a record company’s marketing direction or a prominent magazine’s newly sanctioned term, but once it surfaces in the mainstream, it faces the threat of the obligatory backlash.
In the early ‘90s, all media coverage of Nirvana and Pearl Jam included references to “grunge” music, treating the style as a marketable fad and making the bands cringe in the process.
With “Emo” music’s softer sound and its exposure to a mainstream audience, thanks to the success of bands like Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional, it too has inherited the taint of the grunge tag.
Take for instance these entries defining “Emo” on UrbanDictionary.com (an online dictionary where the users post the definitions): “Repetitive music often characterized by people who take themselves, their image, their taste in music, and their lunchbox far too seriously” or “Emotional music . . . with ovaries.”
With “post,” “anti” or “neo” poised to attach themselves to every musical movement, it seems that only a few sub-genres can surface in the mainstream and avoid overkill.
But since most small music movements get limited exposure, the media’s hype machine doesn’t get a chance to run that often.
That doesn’t mean, however, that hundreds of sub-genres won’t continue to breed underground. And at the rate they’re going, I imagine a “Post-music” section is not far behind.
Never say never.