Genre has always existed as a way to figure out what we want to hear, but now, in a universe of musical streaming and curated Pandora play, there’s less need for categorizing by genre and more need for music to share similar aspects or sounds, to be categorized by small details as opposed to broad genres. Genre, as a tool, isn't important.
When I first heard Troye Sivan’s album Blue Neighbourhood December 2016, it was addictive. It is slow, sultry verses with powerful, anthemic choruses. It’s all heavy-layered vocals, featuring subtle bass and only repetitive, simple, synthesized beats and sounds in the background. It sounds familiar, but not too familiar. New, old, electronic, indie, pop, acoustic – so many different descriptions swarmed my brain, and it didn’t properly fit into any of them. I couldn’t describe it, and that was when I started to wrestle with this idea that genre, as a categorizing device, and as we’ve known it, is dying. Much how Troye’s painted nails and Bowie-esque, androgynous look blurs the lines of gender, he blurs the lines of musical genre, and it didn’t start or end with him.
Genre isn’t disappearing completely – there’s always going to be a massive difference between death metal and country, hip-hop and classical, but the music in the middle is what’s starting to blend together. Beyonce is singing country songs, acoustic musicians are rapping (see: Ed Sheeran), and then you have Twenty One Pilots, who mix everything from punk to ukuleles in a single song. Spotify is still going to need those 944 categories so it can curate playlists for users, it’s just becoming less obvious.
Technology is the biggest influence on this genre ambiguity. There’s a somewhat-hidden practice present in the songwriting world – algorithmic musical composition. Computers analyze hundreds of thousands of songs and figure out the patterns and rhythms most pleasing to the human ear, and which ones people listen to the most. It takes melodies and harmonies humans have been making for centuries and fine-tunes them to figure out which combinations will make us listen again and again. The layered vocals in the chorus of Troye Sivan’s “YOUTH” serve as a perfect example of the addictive, algorithmically-composed melodic patterns that machines have determined enjoyable to most humans. “YOUTH” elicits an emotional response, it doesn’t just sound good, it makes you feel good, like a musical narcotic. It takes all the best parts of music and meshes them together into a 3 minute and 5 second package. It marks the future of music.
Genre-stepping has happened for ages, but this is different. This musical meshing means that the trend of ambiguous genre could be here to stay. It cuts down on losses because writers know what people will like, because it’s statistically proven. No more money will be wasted on flops and sophomore slumps, meaning more money can be put into production and promotion. But for the existence of genre as we know it, this revelation could be bad news, although not necessarily a bad thing.
If there’s a set existence of patterns and sounds that machines have determined to be the most interesting, that means all music composed form these algorithms are a variant of theses same sets. The music all starts to sound the same without actually being the same. This is the case with a lot of house music, which is an “electric and minimalist” off-shot of 80s disco – it’s dance-based and repetitive with synthesized basslines. The use of disk-jockeys and computers to create music never lost steam, and now the basics of house and electronic has crept into the fringes of other genres.
Electronic crept into R&B, to create acts like The Weeknd, and a genre dubbed by music journalists “PBR&B” (a reference to the association of Pabst Blue Ribbon with hipster/alternative culture). It’s a mixture of alternative, electronic, indie and R&B to create an entirely new genre that’s started to entirely encompass popular music. Pop music and its early 2000s glory doesn’t truly exist anymore – bubblegum and Gaga-esque, Fame Monster pop is disappearing. It helped create and has given way to smooth, hypnotic and bass-heavy sounds, like YOUTH, and is helping to eliminate music genre entirely.
I’ve talked to a countless amount of small musicians, and most of them I’ve asked the same question: “What genre do you put yourself in?” Not because I believe in defining something as trivial as a music type, but because I want to hear what they say. Most of them answer with, “I don’t want to define my music.” This could perhaps be because they don’t want to take on an identity and exclude certain people, but it could also be because artists don’t need to worry about radio play anymore. Up until the introduction of streaming, people listened to music mostly on local radio. Now, we can listen to music on demand, any time we want, and don’t have to listen to what the radio dictates. It’s the fall of the musical elite. Stations were genre’d – there was a rock station, a hip-hop station, a country station, etc. Artists and bands needed to fit into one of those categories to be considered appropriate for radio play, and they needed radio play to reach audiences. Now, radio stations don’t matter. What matters is if people are willing to stream your song or not, and what makes them stream it isn’t necessarily genre, it’s the song quality. It’s what makes machine-made music so alluring, because whatever can get people listening is what will make the most money.
John Paul White, a once member of folk-duo the Civil Wars, now a solo artist, echoed this sentiment. “There’s so many people making music,” he said. “So many people now are able to listen to that music, where, when I grew up in Tennessee, the only music I ever heard was the music that either my parents owned or my friends owned, or it’d be on top 40 radio…You had to fit into certain boxes then. Major labels controlled everything, and if you didn’t fit on a specific radio station, no one ever heard you. That was the only way you could get the word out. Now, you don’t need that same vehicle in the same way, your music can get spread far and wide regardless of it fitting in a box.”
Do we need boxes? Maybe not. It’s often easy to get nostalgic for classic rock, but music ambiguity is just mirroring culture at the moment. Art reflects life, after all. It’s marxism translated to music – nothing is out of reach, and nothing is in the way of musical enjoyment. There is no confinement of talents, and like sharing the wealth, it blends a spectrum of music into something universally enjoyed. “It’s a horrible idea to try and create anything and try to make it fit into a genre, but also to try and not make it fit,” said John Paul White. “You just need to create. And whatever your heart tells you, whatever your gut tells you, that’s what it should be.”