Genres

First off, the always interesting Tasha Robinson had this to say in something at The Onion's A.V. Club today:

"But what I absolutely can't stand, and what puts me into a fighting mood faster than anything else, is people blanket-dismissing an entire genre or subculture or area of effort, especially with the always, always, always-uninformed "I'm not interested in that stuff because it's all the same." So here's my pop-culture sacred-cow statement: Every genre is deep, nuanced, complicated, and diverse to its knowledgeable fans. That doesn't mean every genre is for all tastes. You don't have to like industrial or classical or conscious rap or Chicago blues or Beat poetry or fantasy novels or reality TV or whatever else. You aren't even obligated to try them, much less to make the effort to immerse yourself in them enough to tell the classics and the keepers from the trash. Life is short, the world is big and full, and there's nothing wrong with walking away from things that don't speak to you. But people who get snotty or self-righteous about it, as though their personal tastes reflect some sort of immutable reality, steam the hell out of me. Ignorance isn't attractive, but saying "I've never really gotten into [Westerns, opera, FPS games, whatever], and I'm not really interested" isn't nearly as ignorant as lumping together every example of a genre as unnuanced and unworthy. People who do sound exactly like caricatures of '50s parents, squawking about how Elvis and The Beatles are all just stupid noise."

It's funny to see pretty much the exact reason we started this site summed up so nicely.

I'm a genre kind of guy. I like genre movies, genre music, genre books, genre video games, etc. I like being the guy who can tell you the difference between westerns from the 50s and westerns from the 60s, or thrash from the 80s vs. the 90s. As such, it doesn't bother me when artists spend most of their time just kind of coloring inside the lines, so to speak, as long as they do it well.

This isn't to say that genre bending stuff is never good. For example, that Solstafir record I reviewed is incredible and they aren't easily pigeonholed into a specific "genre." There are two things that follow from this, for me, though:

1) Not everything has to be new. Stuff can be derivative and good.

2) Not everything that's new is automatically good. Stuff can be unique and awful.

I only bring this up because this seems to be the exact opposite mentality I find operating in a lot of discourse about art (using that word loosely here) of various kinds (especially music). It seems a lot of people write about music without objective criteria to judge it beyond new, different, first, and essential. What's new and different is what's good, what's not is just pitiful copies.

I think it's important to have criteria to appreciate, for example, a derivative metal album that's well done. I'd rather hear a really kicks ass band that doesn't do anything new but does what they do really well than hear a really innovative band that doesn't really grab me in any way.

As such, I like genres. I like being into them, I like appreciating the subtle nuances of them, and, like Tasha Robinson, I don't like it when people confuse their dislike of a genre's conventions with a lack of interesting stuff coming out of the genre.