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koganbotI really like this post by Jonathan Bradley about distinguishing genres by sound versus distinguishing them by culture. This was my response (I was fundamentally saying that the two interweave - sound is culture - and that the direction of his argument wasn't against using sound as a criterion but against reducing one's criteria to sound):
I love this post, and think you're quite right, or anyway more right than wrong, but now let me confuse the issue by pointing out that a lot of people are pretty good at picking out the genre of a track they'd never heard before and don't know anything about, and they do so by how it sounds. What I mean is that they identify what cultural category something belongs to by hearing its sound, and they subconsciously employ a lot of complicated socio-acoustic cultural knowledge in doing so. In other words, when people think they're using your first method of classification they're actually using the second. So if some guy hears an '80s mainstream rock song, an '80s country song, and an '00s country song that sounds a lot more similar to the '80s mainstream rock song than to the '80s country song, and he hasn't heard the songs before but is relatively familiar with the genres, he'll nonetheless correctly peg the '00s country song as country. And if he's like me he probably won't be able to tell you why he categorizes the three the way he does - what the sonic-cultural clues are that he used - at least won't be able to tell you with any great precision. -And then he and his friends might get into an argument over whether the '00s track is really country - nonetheless, those who care enough about music to get into such an argument are also likely to be pretty good at picking out how other people tend to categorize such songs, and where to look for the CD at the record store, even if they themselves categorize the songs differently, or wish they could. With the '00s country song, there are probably small cues in the production that identify it as '00s rather than '80s, and bits in the singing and possibly token bits in the instrumentation that also place it as '00s country, and that's how our guy gets these things "right," even without being able to explain how he's done so.
However, there are huge huge huge areas of dispute and confusion and contention where finding consensus as to how to categorize things "right" isn't quite possible (or desirable) even on the level of "what bin at the record store do we look at?"; e.g., "Run This Town" is "pop" and "r&b" and "hip-hop," and there's no way to make it one but not the other, and there are people who'd probably want to read something like it out of hip-hop, and others who'd want to read it out of r&b, and maybe a few who'd want to read it out of pop for being mediocre, or rescue it from one or another of those categories, and while these people might make viable arguments those arguments usually won't win the culture over, won't get us to stop mixing up and mixing in those categories. And the categories are shifting anyway.
As a thought experiment, imagine our guy in a blindfold test hearing a Bel Biv DeVoe dance track that was an album track he'd not heard, and then hearing a nonhit by a Backstreet Boys imitation band in '99 that was trying to ape the success of "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)," and then hearing one of the harder rocking album tracks from Hole's "Celebrity Skin" (and let's say he's never heard the album) and then hearing Ashlee's "I Am Me," which is a nonsingle from an album that very few boys bought. Now here my guess is that the sonics won't lead him to definitive categorizations ('cause definitive categorizations aren't there to be had in this example) and that he'd categorize Bel Biv DeVoe with the Backstreet Boys imitators and would categorize Courtney with Ashlee, and what category he puts them in might depend on how old he is. Unless he recognizes Ashlee's voice - which is unlikely - he could easily categorize Ashlee as rock rather than Courtney as teenpop, and he might call the Bel Biv DeVoe and the faux Backstreeters "teen r&b." (And who's to say that once Ashlee channels her, then Courtney isn't teenpop in retrospect? And if our guy were neither a Courtney fan nor an Ashlee fan he might wonder if the Hole and the Ashlee track are by the same band but using a different producer.)
Culture overrides all.
"Culture" is too vague and broad a term, in that everything you're talking about - beats, business models, and so on - are cultural creations and our understandings of them are cultural.* Culture is the sum total of those things. So the word "culture" in "culture overrides all" doesn't really explain anything. But where your post actually seems to be leading is the idea that no single criterion dominates all others, even if that criterion is "how the culture generally categorizes this," given that in the normal course categories get disputed and different groups of listeners categorize music differently, and sometimes a minority opinion suddenly outshouts every other, and categories get reordered or overthrown. Which is to say that your phrase "unified by culture" is never completely true, since culture also makes genre a matter of dispute, the disputes being as cultural as the agreements. But more specifically, beats, for instance, can and often do contribute to how something is categorized; it's just that they alone are never definitive, and sometimes they get outvoted, as it were.
[EDIT: God, that "me and the crew used to do her" line in Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison" is really misogynist. I mean, misogyny isn't news: the line just hit me as I was listening. I doubt that there are any lyrics like it by the Backstreet Boys, whatever their general relationship to patriarchy or whatever (though I haven't listened extensively enough to the Backstreet Boys catalogue to know; but I know for a fact that my imaginary Backstreet Boys imitation band would never insult women and girls in such a way). In any event, maybe a line like that is a genre tipoff.]
*Our understandings of the moon and stars and atoms and quarks are cultural as well, but that's a different discussion.
I also linked Wittgenstein excerpts about family resemblance and the ilX discussion of Superwords as both being crucially useful tools in understanding this issue. (The ilX thread didn't start off about Superwords, and when it got there the topic was just one among many, so you have to search "superword" and then keep searching.)
I love this post, and think you're quite right, or anyway more right than wrong, but now let me confuse the issue by pointing out that a lot of people are pretty good at picking out the genre of a track they'd never heard before and don't know anything about, and they do so by how it sounds. What I mean is that they identify what cultural category something belongs to by hearing its sound, and they subconsciously employ a lot of complicated socio-acoustic cultural knowledge in doing so. In other words, when people think they're using your first method of classification they're actually using the second. So if some guy hears an '80s mainstream rock song, an '80s country song, and an '00s country song that sounds a lot more similar to the '80s mainstream rock song than to the '80s country song, and he hasn't heard the songs before but is relatively familiar with the genres, he'll nonetheless correctly peg the '00s country song as country. And if he's like me he probably won't be able to tell you why he categorizes the three the way he does - what the sonic-cultural clues are that he used - at least won't be able to tell you with any great precision. -And then he and his friends might get into an argument over whether the '00s track is really country - nonetheless, those who care enough about music to get into such an argument are also likely to be pretty good at picking out how other people tend to categorize such songs, and where to look for the CD at the record store, even if they themselves categorize the songs differently, or wish they could. With the '00s country song, there are probably small cues in the production that identify it as '00s rather than '80s, and bits in the singing and possibly token bits in the instrumentation that also place it as '00s country, and that's how our guy gets these things "right," even without being able to explain how he's done so.
However, there are huge huge huge areas of dispute and confusion and contention where finding consensus as to how to categorize things "right" isn't quite possible (or desirable) even on the level of "what bin at the record store do we look at?"; e.g., "Run This Town" is "pop" and "r&b" and "hip-hop," and there's no way to make it one but not the other, and there are people who'd probably want to read something like it out of hip-hop, and others who'd want to read it out of r&b, and maybe a few who'd want to read it out of pop for being mediocre, or rescue it from one or another of those categories, and while these people might make viable arguments those arguments usually won't win the culture over, won't get us to stop mixing up and mixing in those categories. And the categories are shifting anyway.
As a thought experiment, imagine our guy in a blindfold test hearing a Bel Biv DeVoe dance track that was an album track he'd not heard, and then hearing a nonhit by a Backstreet Boys imitation band in '99 that was trying to ape the success of "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)," and then hearing one of the harder rocking album tracks from Hole's "Celebrity Skin" (and let's say he's never heard the album) and then hearing Ashlee's "I Am Me," which is a nonsingle from an album that very few boys bought. Now here my guess is that the sonics won't lead him to definitive categorizations ('cause definitive categorizations aren't there to be had in this example) and that he'd categorize Bel Biv DeVoe with the Backstreet Boys imitators and would categorize Courtney with Ashlee, and what category he puts them in might depend on how old he is. Unless he recognizes Ashlee's voice - which is unlikely - he could easily categorize Ashlee as rock rather than Courtney as teenpop, and he might call the Bel Biv DeVoe and the faux Backstreeters "teen r&b." (And who's to say that once Ashlee channels her, then Courtney isn't teenpop in retrospect? And if our guy were neither a Courtney fan nor an Ashlee fan he might wonder if the Hole and the Ashlee track are by the same band but using a different producer.)
Culture overrides all.
"Culture" is too vague and broad a term, in that everything you're talking about - beats, business models, and so on - are cultural creations and our understandings of them are cultural.* Culture is the sum total of those things. So the word "culture" in "culture overrides all" doesn't really explain anything. But where your post actually seems to be leading is the idea that no single criterion dominates all others, even if that criterion is "how the culture generally categorizes this," given that in the normal course categories get disputed and different groups of listeners categorize music differently, and sometimes a minority opinion suddenly outshouts every other, and categories get reordered or overthrown. Which is to say that your phrase "unified by culture" is never completely true, since culture also makes genre a matter of dispute, the disputes being as cultural as the agreements. But more specifically, beats, for instance, can and often do contribute to how something is categorized; it's just that they alone are never definitive, and sometimes they get outvoted, as it were.
[EDIT: God, that "me and the crew used to do her" line in Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison" is really misogynist. I mean, misogyny isn't news: the line just hit me as I was listening. I doubt that there are any lyrics like it by the Backstreet Boys, whatever their general relationship to patriarchy or whatever (though I haven't listened extensively enough to the Backstreet Boys catalogue to know; but I know for a fact that my imaginary Backstreet Boys imitation band would never insult women and girls in such a way). In any event, maybe a line like that is a genre tipoff.]
*Our understandings of the moon and stars and atoms and quarks are cultural as well, but that's a different discussion.
I also linked Wittgenstein excerpts about family resemblance and the ilX discussion of Superwords as both being crucially useful tools in understanding this issue. (The ilX thread didn't start off about Superwords, and when it got there the topic was just one among many, so you have to search "superword" and then keep searching.)
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Re: You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance
Date: 2009-10-05 02:50 am (UTC)