When genre names morph

[DJ PIMP]

Yazz - The only way is up

Yazz with Coldcut & Bomb the Bass

 

[noel emits]

See that's why as a Britisher I never understood why James Murphy said 'you want to make something real, you want to make a Yaz(z) record.' She's not real, she's in the Plastic Population! But now I get it because Yaz(oo) is all done with analogue synths and all those neo electro fetishists would have been trying to emulate that. Glad that's sorted

 

[michael]

Haha, sounds like a lot of non-American music snobs the world over were all going "what" when they heard that LCD Soundsystem track. I was in the same boat, then remembered an American friend talking about Yazoo without the "oo".

Interesting to know about the electro crossover of Situations and Hard Times.

 

[DRMHCP]

Well, it's not my fault you're ignorant of it, maybe you were into Pearl Jam around '96; for everyone else, it was a hi-NRG / handbag house crossover which killed a few months in the summer of Britpop.

There was a harder version too called "hardbag" kind of a cross between (early) hard house and handbag...Pete Wardman used to mention it/play it on his Kiss afternoon show in the mid-90s.

 

[zhao]

I've done a lil research on genrefication... from what I can tell, genres frequently begin in a particular social/subcultural context. So house music was originally just music played at the Warehouse: disco, new wave, Kraftwerk, etc. I have a South African friend who gave me a bunch of "kwaito" -- turned out a lot of it was just cheesy Ministry of Sound house, but it was kwaito to him because it gets played in the same places to the same crowds (mr sloane confirm?). Or how "funk" in Rio can mean James Brown or indigenous booty bass -- because they're all played at the funk parties. The actual SOUNDS of the records matter less than the context of listening in which they are enmeshed, and the genre term tends to be colloquial and informal.

What happens is that typically an "outsider" of some kind (journalist/traveller/slummer) gets turned on to this subculture and exports it based on a set of SOUNDS, which concretizes/reifies the genre into a more formal pattern, and sets the stage for micogenrefication. This exporting brings a new kind of market pressure on the genre: instead of satisfying insiders with a comprehensive socio-cultural experience, producers are tied to a particular sound (infinitely more exportable than a complex social mileu).

The example from my own work is Detroit "ghettotech": initially it was just simple techno-bass tracks Detroit producers made to incorporate into mixes of the popular styles: electro, first wave techno, and Miami bass pitched up to 45 RPM. There wasn't a name for the style: DJs called it ghetto bass, techno bass, bass, fast shit, etc; audiences called it "mix music." It took an outsider, Disco D, a white kid from the suburbs, picking up on the style, isolating it as a set of sounds (fast tempo, electro palette, Miami bass syncopation, dirty chants), branding it ghettotech (which offended many of the original DJs), and exporting it abroad where it became isolated as a rather narrow genre and associated DJing style. Producers then start to serve these dispersed audiences who wanted a particular branded SOUND, not a more amorphous CONTEXT. If you listen to the old DJ Assault & Mr. De stuff, it's much weirder than what the genre became known for -- "Ass n Titties."

I'm still trying to work out the particulars in my mind, but the difference between CONTEXT (with less division between producers/consumers) and SOUND (with a much stronger dichotomy) seems key.

i just revisited this today... good stuff.

 

[michael]

Another one... once upon a time (i.e. when he was recording stuff) Gram Parsons was the founder of 'country rock'. Now he's the grandaddy of 'alt-country'. Hm.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Now he's the grandaddy of 'alt-country'. Hm.

Which often seems to be written 'alt.country', as if it's part of a URL or something.

 

[cutups]

i'm not sure it really counts in the broadest sense (hardcore punk didn't change into hardcore techno), but

"hardcore"

in some ways it was more a descriptor than a genre. within the world
of rock it's subtley shifted many different ways. in the electronic world,
i first heard it attributed to uk breakbeat stuff, then for a long period was more of
a catch all for everything hard, gabber, speedcore, breakcore, etc. now alot
of ravers have re-couped it and use it interchangably with happy hardcore.