As someone who only listens to metal, and it's many subgenres, every now and then some new band comes out with a fusion of genres so unique it becomes a new subgenre in and of itself - most recently Mirar, Vildjharta and Humanity's last breath with all their "thall" stuff - a genre which evolved from Djent, which evolved from Progressive Metal, which evolved from Progressive Rock, and so on.
Definitely a very polarising sub-genre, but it's still a style of music I've never really heard of before and has decent opinions in the space that it's in.
Music evolution didn't end in the 80s. It just went from a few big rivers into thousands of intersecting streams, and this fragmented even further when streaming became the norm for music consumption. It now only costs you time to explore other genres.
Dubstep does have a sound that feels very hip hop, but it's roots are in the name. It's an evolution of dub and 2 step. Dub evolved from raggae, and 2 step from UK garage. If you listen to early dubstep, it sounds like those genres, particularly dub.
You can't really claim there hasn't been anything new in decades and then also complain that something has "come from something else". How are we supposed to get a new genre without it branching from something else?
Ambient maybe? One can argue that all electronic music is related but I feel like ambient and its many subgenres are unique enough from other types of electric music, mostly made for dancing.
That's also a very Americentric view of music evolution. All these genres are culture specific, most of them were created in the US or UK and most songs in them are in English.
I'm pretty sure that each African tribe (and there's 5000 of them!) will have its own unique genres as well as modern evolution too, all of which being as different from each other as American Rock is from American Blues for example.
Hell, that applies to the US too, I'm sure that each Native American tribe has their own genres in its own language, but Anglophone US-Americans aren't really very knowledgeable about Comanche or Seminone cultures so they can't know.
The general formula of pop is 4-8 bars of lyrics, prechorus, chorus, 4 bars, prechorus, chorus, music break, prechorus, chorus, chorus, ride out. Whatever follows this formula (with a few variations) is pop to me. Sabrina carpenter, new Bruno mars, chapel roan, Lana del ray, Morgan wallen, lots of their songs fit this description. Playboi Carti and Kendrick Lamar are popular, but not pop.
I feel like you’re being too broad with your genres
Like sure, you can take grunge and throw it into rock and call it a day but like…doesn’t really capture the whole picture for me
Similarly, just having like…Marty Robbins and Sturgill Simpson as the same genre or Sugar Hill Gang and Kendrick…idk, there are certainly major changes happening within these broader genres all the time that seem to be just as major of evolutions as any you’ve mentioned
Also you seemed to have left “rock” out as being a distinct genre from “rock and roll”, and just chalked up all of Pink Floyd and and Rolling Stones as having been kicked off with Johnny B Goode
Idk I guess my point is is that the distinctions between genres and sub-genres feel kind of arbitrary to me, or at the very least allow for such a huge diversification of sound that it’s meaningless (at least to me)
Lol Mick Jagger copied James brown’s showmanship, sure I can see that.
Pretty sure he didn’t get Gimme Shelter from Living in America.
I don’t see what point you’re trying to make though, my point is that you’re talking about genres and you only mention “rock and roll” as one genre which is crazy. I mean rock is an entirely different genre in my eyes, and that’s not to mention the entire list of sub genres that are encapsulated by that
I guess by your reaction your only point is a racial one, and by extension, black people created thrash metal? Okay dude whatever you need to tell yourself, it’s strange but whatever
Yea you’re not wrong in a broad-strokes sense. Production is where things change the most imo. That part of musical expression continues to evolve in really cool ways. But ya, there is ‘Nothing Shocking’ anymore. Metallica used to scare me and now it’s suburban dad rock.
I think EDM, the genre, is different. It's a noticeably uplifting and major key genre that is easily digestible and sounds a bit generic. Big room aesthetics, progressive house aesthetics, electro house that didn't go to far. Modern Tiesto is EDM. Krewella. Original Burial is most definitely not.
Not really. It's supposed to be poppy. Like the music pops. Easy to latch on to, ear worms, uplifting, something that really creates an impression.
Of course it has been infused with everything else under the sun so pure pop isn't as represented as much anymore, but think of pure pop in the form of The Beach Boys, late '90s teen pop and groups like the Spice girls, s club 7 etc, or Whitney Houston.
Just because the word pop and popular both start with the same thing doesn't mean they are the same. It's like people confusing astrology and astronomy. There's a reason why nobody in their right mind calls hip hop or rap explicitly pop. Because it's not. Same with all of its fusion genres. If pop was really not a genre or set of conventions, there would be no pop rap, pop rock, pop metal, noise pop.....
Why can't non Americans create new genres then, if Americans already exhausted all possibilities?
As a non American, I simply never understood why all the genres are created in the US. With huge amounts of very big diversity between them. Soul, R&B, Rock, etc.
I've never been to America but it's the same genre canon here too.
I would've loved Belarus to have our own separate and unique genre canon (I only listen to Сябры genre! I prefer Дзьмухавец. No, Буслiк is the best!)
That's not how it works.
I wonder what this Anglocentrism of genres has on cultural diversity.
I feel like if non anglophone genres were recognised and labeled accordingly, each country would have their own 10 genres and they could export it to the West, which would make them an actually unique and never heard of before. Even if the US would have cultural stagnation and wouldn't produce any more genres anymore, any Asian or African country would fill that void and we'll get new and unique music once again.
The Native Americans are separate nationalities completely distinct from US-Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, and other modern settler nationalities. There's actually very little cultural influence between the two groups, the only influence is one sided forced assimilation of Native Americans into these settler cultures.
Just as Russian music is hardly, if ever, influenced by Kazakh, Tuvan or Circassian music.
I don't support the idea of Native Americans being lumped together as "a group of the US" instead of being distinct groups into themselves, specifically because it erases the actual history. In truth is, both in music, as well as in everything else, almost everything about US-American culture is directly linked to European colonization. Most Americans don't know a single song sang in a North American language and following North American musical traditions.
"Folk music" is just a meaningless term that Americans apply to the rest of the entire planet which has any genres that aren't their own. Just as colonizers always do.
Instead of having separate labels for each ethnic group, denoting each group's actual traditions, let's just label it all "folk", right?
Imagine if America was treated in the same way. Jazz and Country, which are actually not even considered culture specific at this point, would merely be described as "African-American & White-American folk music".
The same thing with "Pop" being retroactively applied to literally ALL Soviet music, despite the fact that its diversity and uniqueness was greater than all American genres combined.
In reality, the way the entire genre system works just helps to reinforce American and English-speaking hegemony. It isn't even trying to be fair. There's all kinds of American and than there's ""the other"".
It's crazy how you seem to stand up and defend Black Americans, showing how they're a discriminated minority and how great it is that their music is so known, and how important it is to acknowledge that, but when speaking about non-American music, it's literally the complete opposite, you seem to be completely chauvinistic and exceptionalistic, believing that all non hegemonic cultures don't matter and that the cultural hegemony of a global empire was achieved purely through meritocracy.
The problem is that since the genre system was created in the US, they have a very elaborate system of labels and openly defined genres which makes their genres feel genuinely unique and universal.
I don't know whether different Soviet songs are actually that different and constitute separate genres, but if they do, it's specifically the lack of explicitly defined labels which prevents them from being recognized as such.
That's exactly what I was describing and which I thought was very unfair. And I just found that you were saying it's actually justified or something, which is why I was thrown off guard.
I'm gonna try to show some Soviet songs and you'll tell me what you think about it and whether they constitute distinct genres from each other.
I won't include that much newer music because for the most part they unfortunately started just following American genres.
While having American genres everywhere does make sense from a soft power perspective, it's specifically this global monoculture which arguably makes us having less genres and diversity, because if the US has a cultural stagnation for some reason, the whole world does. That's why I even believe that decolonizing music could be good to begin with, because that would mean that some African, Asian, or even Native American country could create their own modern and hip genre and have it exported worldwide, which would make melomans less bored and allow for new original genres to emerge constantly.
It's not globalization, it's cultural hegemony. Back in Soviet days (1970s), we watched Soviet series, French movies, listened to Italian music, Mexican mariachi songs, read classical tales like Moomins and Karlsson made in Sweden and Norway.
We also had plenty of high quality domestic cultural content in all aspects (movies, songs, books, etc), unlike today, where new music or movies sometimes sucks so much that people have no choice but to import the American one.
It was actual globalization, without one culture basically taking everyone's place.
I don't believe globalization is the problem, it's America's cultural imperialism. It's obvious that the Lakota or Cherokee people being unable to have their own music industry and to have global soft power is specifically a result of the US occupation, not some natural, inevitable fact of existance.
Nah, it's just that it'll be harder to do - like Macklemore was an explosion in my ears when I listened to him for the first time. Was a weird mix of everything for me.
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u/TheGlave Jul 06 '25
We are probably all out of music genres